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be-not-afeared · 3 years

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Jaime Lannister and John Silver: of arcs and endings

Or, herein follows a possibly niche comparison between the character arcs of Jaime Lannister (Game of Thrones, HBO, 2011-2019) and John Silver (Black Sails, Starz, 2014-2017), in which I will argue that Jaime’s character arc fails not because of Jaime’s actions, but because of the way his story is framed to the viewer throughout the series, using Silver as a springboard to explore the requisites for a tragic yet satisfying ending.

(Yes, this is 5K words long. No, I am not sorry. Spoilers for Jaime’s and Silver’s storylines in their respective shows, and while I’ve tried to stay vague about the Bigger Picture, read at your own risk.)

Okay, so. I was, and still am, to an extent, a huge Game of Thrones fan. I’ve pored over the books, been to conventions, and spent a good couple of years while I was at uni discussing fan theories on message boards into the early hours of the morning. Jaime Lannister has been one of my favourite fictional characters for over a decade. Yet I certainly wasn’t alone in watching in horror as years of hopeful build up was thrown away in the span of one and a half episodes during the final season of the show. There are *many* things that hurt about season 8 of Game of Thrones. But the swift 180 we see in Jaime, from aiding the Starks in the Battle of Winterfell and finally choosing Brienne, to abandoning her to return to Cersei 20 minutes later, was, for me, one of the deepest cuts.

When I started watching Black Sails this August, I was immediately compelled by Silver – unsurprisingly, as someone who has exactly one favourite character type: Traumatised and Morally Grey Anti-Villain. Watching Silver’s character develop over the four seasons of Black Sails was an absolute joy, and his ending in the finale, though *incredibly difficult*, was nuanced and in character and satisfying. (Am going to try and keep as vague as possible on details here, because Black Sails is an incredible show that more people should watch and I don’t want to completely spoil the ending). Silver and Jaime are two characters with a lot of similarities and their characters arcs appear to run in direct parallel with each other: both selfish and arrogant men who become more empathetic and invested in others as the series progresses, in large part prompted by the loss of a limb. However, the gulf in reception of their overall arcs can be pinpointed to one huge disparity between the way both storylines were framed to the audience, and that is difference between redemption and tragedy.

“I was that hand”

But first! Let’s start with the more obvious stuff.

When we meet Jaime Lannister and John Silver in the pilots of their respective shows, they are both introduced as arrogant and self-serving – yet charming – men, who place the needs of themselves (and Cersei, in Jaime’s case) above all else. Silver kills and impersonates the cook on the merchant ship Flint’s crew captures, and has no qualms about lying his way onto the crew whilst simultaneously planning to sell the Urca schedule to the highest bidder. For Silver, his own survival comes before any sense of moral code. We are told stories about Jaime before we properly meet him – that he killed the previous king, Aerys Targaryen, that he has no honour – but nothing that we see first-hand contradicts this; at the end of the pilot he attempts to kill a child to cover up his and Cersei’s incestuous relationship. Silver is certainly supposed to be more likeable than Jaime, but both men, despite their lack of morals, are presented as charming, clever, and good with a one-liner. As we move through the early seasons of both shows, they are consistent in these traits, although Jaime is presented as an outright antagonist whereas Silver from the outset is a morally grey unknown entity, keeping viewers on our toes wondering if he’ll turn against Flint, against Billy, against Eleanor. Things change, for both men, however, with the direct lead up and fallout of the loss of a limb: Jaime’s hand and Silver’s leg.

The introduction of Brienne of Tarth as Jaime’s foil kickstarts his path towards becoming the honourable man he once dreamed of being. During their roadtrip across Westeros, she challenges him and is able to get under his skin in a way we haven’t yet seen before. This comes to a head when the duo are captured, and Jaime intervenes during her attempted rape, lying about her ransom worth and saving her from an awful fate. The result? The immediate amputation of Jaime’s sword hand, representative of Jaime’s identity (“I was that hand”). Jaime is punished for the first selfless act we see him commit on the show with the loss of the source of his power and self-worth.

Silver, in a similar fashion, finds himself in a position to save the crew he has spent two seasons disparaging. When he is offered the opportunity to betray his crew for an escape route, he refuses (the reasons for this refusal never outright stated, although I imagine Flint’s “where else will you wake up in the morning and matter” and Billy’s “that’s our brother you’ve got there” both factor heavily). Again, the result of this refusal is the brutal torture and eventual amputation of Silver’s leg – a man who in his own words is “not a joiner”, prone to taking what he needs and leaving, to reinventing himself, to always having an escape route. As actor Luke Arnold says: “He's a guy who's always had one leg out the door, and then they cut it off.”

What is interesting here is not only that we have two characters who are *punished* for moving beyond their selfishness, but that that punishment is specifically catered towards their defining characteristics. Jaime is left unable to fight, unable to defend himself, unable to uphold his reputation. Silver is left unable to run, unable to leave his past behind him, unable to remain without attachments. Both are left vulnerable. The loss of Jaime’s hand forces him to reinvent himself in a world ruled by swords; as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, father to Tommen, and an honourable man working to uphold his oath, through Brienne, to Catelyn Stark. The loss of Silver’s leg, however, leaves him *unable* to reinvent himself; forcing him to rely on his crew and paving the way for the growth of his relationship with Flint and Madi. In losing their limbs both Jaime and Silver are set on paths towards gaining empathy, and are able to become invested in those around them.

“Defined by their histories, distorted to fit their narratives”

Game of Thrones and Black Sails both engage heavily with ideas of myth-making and storytelling. Stories are woven into the mythology of Westeros; a world with thousands of years of history revealed to us slowly over the seasons to suit the narrative and the teller. We are told the story of Rhaegar Targaryen’s kidnap and rape of Lyanna Stark in the pilot, and at first this serves to provide a tragic landscape for Robert’s unhealthy relationship with his wife and his crown. It is only as the show develops and we hear more about Rhaegar and Lyanna that we realise there is more to this story; in season 5 Littlefinger recounts the events of the Tourney of Harrenhal to foreshadow the reveal of Jon’s parentage later that season, that Rhaegar and Lyanna had a happy and consensual relationship and that it is Robert who could be viewed as the villain of this sequence. We are taught through watching the show to never assume that any given story is true. Black Sails similarly plays with the idea of the power of the storyteller, combining historical pirates with fictional pirates and an origin story for Treasure Island, and going to great lengths to show that history is in the hands of the victor. Most of the primary sources of pirate history are from the perspective of civilised England, and in the process of watching the show we come to realise the bias inherent in these histories; much like in Game of Thrones, they are stories, and should not be assumed to be either true or accurate. As Jack says in the finale: “a story is true, a story is untrue […] The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive”.

Jaime Lannister and John Silver are both characters defined by stories that are forced upon them without choice: the Kingslayer and Long John Silver. We meet Jaime as the Kingslayer; our opinion of him is immediately formed by the story of him stabbing in the back the King he had sworn to protect, and cemented by the fact that our protagonist, Ned Stark, a man we like and trust, is the one telling this story. The Kingslayer’s presence is so strong in the first two seasons of the show that Jaime becomes nameless, reduced to this one defining act. It is only after the loss of his hand, and through his developing bond with Brienne, that he is finally able to tell his own story and we realise our entire perception of Jaime’s character has been based on an incorrect interpretation of events: that in killing Aerys Targaryen Jaime was saving the population of Kings Landing from destruction via wildfire. It is only after the truth of this story has been revealed to us that Jaime is able to begin moving past the Kingslayer and forging a new identity.

We see this in reverse in Black Sails, for the story of Long John Silver is not introduced until the season 3 finale, but like Jaime, this story is not told by Silver. Billy creates the myth of Long John, commits the acts attributed to him, and uses him as a figurehead for the pirate rebellion all without Silver’s knowledge or consent. Season 4 sees Silver wrestle with this identity of King of the Pirates, surrounded by people who want to use ‘Long John Silver’ for their own benefit: Billy, Israel Hands, even Flint. As the power and influence of Long John Silver the story grows, John Silver the man is disregarded, and his value reduced to how he can further everyone else’s individual causes. Though he does embrace this title (for a time, at least) to further “Flint and Madi’s war”, a cause he doesn’t truly believe in beyond his investment in Flint and Madi as people, we come to realise that the ‘character’ of Long John Silver that we know from Treasure Island is only that: a character, a story, a collective created for a larger cause that Silver himself eventually betrays.

I have seen some criticism of this scene, but for me one of the few redeeming moments of the Game of Thrones finale was Brienne writing Jaime’s story in the Book of White. Despite Jaime’s less than satisfactory conclusion, with this act he is finally able to move past the Kingslayer; Brienne has rewritten his narrative, and he will be remembered as a Knight who “died protecting his Queen”. Silver is offered no such release. By contrast, the story of Long John Silver is all that will be remembered; the worst fear for a man who cannot bear for his own story to be known. Indeed, we learn that “those who stood to benefit most from [Long John Silver] were the most eager to leave it all behind”. While Jaime is able to escape the story of the Kingslayer, the story of Long John Silver is what will endure, “all that is left of [him] is the monster in the story they tell their children”. Hello Treasure Island.

“Reviled by so many for my finest act"

We can see here that Jaime and Silver’s narratives deal with similar themes, but often in contrasting ways. Just as with storytelling, Jaime and Silver’s backstories are key parts of their storylines in their respective shows, but operate with very different functions. (It is only as I am writing this that I’m realising how similar the themes of Game of Thrones and Black Sails actually are? If only Game of Thrones had the follow through of Black Sails... We were all rooting for you, etc etc).

Jaime’s backstory, and the truth of the act that earned him the title ‘Kingslayer’, is revealed to us mid-way through season 3. This comes at a very key moment for his character: Jaime has just lost his hand and is at his most vulnerable, and Brienne’s stubborn and persistent honour is clearly starting to affect him. “I trust you,” he says to her in the bathroom scene in 3x05, and we can assume that this is the first time he has said this to someone who isn’t a Lannister in quite some time, possibly ever. Essentially, the reveal of Jaime’s backstory comes at a moment where we are already beginning to soften towards him and are therefore open to hearing an alternative interpretation of events. While Jaime needs to be able to tell his story to begin to move past the identity of the Kingslayer, if this reveal had come too soon it wouldn’t have had the same dramatic effect, as viewers wouldn’t have been open to seeing him in a different light. All we saw of Jaime in the first two seasons was the “man without honour” that everyone believes him to be; by mid-season three we are already beginning to realise that there is perhaps more to him that meets the eye, so the reveal of his backstory has the most impact.

(This is exactly what Black Sails does with Flint’s backstory, and I firmly believe that if we had been told his story in season one as was originally the plan it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as effective. We needed to know more about Flint, and to see his uneasy partnership with Silver begin to develop as we delved into the backstory piece by piece, so that by 2x05 our hearts were ready to be broken. Buuut that’s a different essay.)

Black Sails loves a backstory. As we move through the show we slowly learn why and how our favourite characters came to be in Nassau , and universally these reveals add to our understanding of that character and their motivations: for Flint, for Billy, for Max, for Jack. We enter season four with Silver as the only character we don’t know anything about prior to the pilot. Surely then, we were about to get a ‘Jaime Lannister bathroom scene’ equivalent, a moment that will add depth and understanding to Silver’s character? Were any of the stories he has told about his past true? Who is Solomon Little? … Instead, what we get is one of my favourite sequences of the entire show, in which, after Flint realises that he knows nothing of Silver’s past, Silver reveals that Flint, and by proxy the viewer, knows “of [him] all [he] can bear to be known”. Silver is the ultimate storyteller, master of manipulating and deceiving others through the power of a narrative, yet he cannot bear to be the story himself. We never learn Silver’s backstory, and all he reveals of his past is that it speaks to “events of the kind no one can divine any meaning from, other than the world is a place of unending horrors”; he has chosen to repress his past, has rendered it unspeakable, and both Flint and the viewer are only left to wonder at what these “horrors” could be.

Although this lack of backstory adds nothing to our view of who Silver *was*, it is key to understanding who Silver *is*, and *why* Silver makes some of his more controversial choices further down the line. Silver’s need to repress his past is as key to his character as Flint’s need to define himself by his own backstory. We understand from this that Silver has experienced a level of trauma which is unspeakable, quite a feat for a show with plenty of other horrific backstories and especially pertinent given that Silver is one of our most gifted orators. Silver’s inability to process his past explains a lot of his actions in the early seasons; his coping mechanism has been to move through life without forming attachments, convincing himself that he doesn’t need (and shouldn’t need) other people. It is safe to assume that Madi and Flint are the first people he has let himself be truly vulnerable with, which paints his actions throughout season four in a different light; loving people is new for Silver, and he doesn’t know how to do it in a healthy or selfless way. The placement of this scene is as important to Black Sails as Jamie’s bathroom scene is to Game of Thrones; we needed to have already seen Long John Silver’s significance to the war spiral beyond Silver’s control, to have seen him become compromised by his love for Madi and the beginnings of the collapse of his partnership with Flint, for this scene to pack the punch that it aims for and to beautifully set up the culmination of his arc in the finale. How devastating, for a man who cannot bear for himself to be known, to be the one figure whose story will outlive them all.

Both of these scenes have stayed with me long past my first watch, and feel vital to understanding Jaime and Silver as characters. For Jaime, his backstory informs all his actions moving forward, his desire to transcend the Kingslayer, to become an “Oathkeeper”, or even “Golden-hand the Just”. For Silver, his lack of backstory informs all his actions up to this point in the narrative and prepares us for the choices to come. Just as Jaime is defined by his past, Silver is defined by his *lack* of past.

“This is not what I wanted”

So, we’ve tracked Jaime and Silver’s characters throughout the show, but how do they both end? The answer, of course, is… tragically. Jaime is offered a glimpse at what could be a peaceful life, in Winterfell with Brienne, before turning it down to return to Cersei’s side only to meet his end while the duo try to escape the collapsing walls of Kings Landing. Silver betrays Flint and Madi in a horrific fashion, ensuring that they both survive though knowing that in doing so he was destroying his relationship with Flint and that there was a chance Madi would never forgive him his actions. (Or, this is my chosen interpretation of the ending, in any case, although the point still works if you prefer one of the other readings). Just thinking about Silver’s ending in Black Sails makes me want to cry. Thinking about Jaime’s ending in Game of Thrones makes to want to cry too, although for a very different reason. Neither are the ending we would hope for these characters in an optimistic and ideal world. But Silver’s decision to betray Flint and Madi feels narratively satisfying in a way that Jaime’s decision to betray Brienne and return to Cersei never could. Why is that?

Jaime Lannister’s character progression from season 3 onwards was set up as a redemption arc. We thought we were watching a jaded and selfish man become an honourable man. The show, admittedly, takes its sweet time with this journey in comparison to the book equivalent, and inserts some *interesting* deviations which I won’t dwell on here (looking at you 4x03 and the entirety of season 5). But, ultimately, the journey that Jaime finds himself on from the moment he loses his hand seems to be heading for a triumphant ending. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting him to survive the series. But I was expecting him to go out in a blaze of glory – fighting side by side with Brienne, perhaps, or protecting Bran, or one of the other characters he had wronged in the past. There was also always the chance that he would end up fulfilling the much subscribed to book theory of the valonqar, although this admittedly looked less likely as that particular line of the prophecy was cut from the show. When Jaime finally leaves Cersei at the end of season 7 it is such a triumphant moment – after years of struggling with these warring parts of himself, his toxic love for Cersei and his growing moral conscience, a decision had been made and a tie cut. We enter season 8 assuming that there is no going back. We don’t get a hint of any conflicting feelings from Jaime about this decision in the first half of season 8; we are focused on preparation for the Battle of Winterfell, and revelling in the joy of having Jaime and Brienne in the same place for longer than a single episode for the first time since season 4. We get the knighting scene (which, let’s be honest, is where the season peaks). We get the battle. We get the sex scene between Jaime and Brienne (which I… don’t love, for many reasons up to and including the weird virgin shaming jokes from Tyrion in the previous scene and their level of intoxication, but still gives no hint that Jaime is battling an inner war). And then later in that same episode, despite Brienne pleading with him to stay, we get Jaime’s snap decision to return to Kings Landing to attempt to save Cersei: “You think I’m a good man? […] She’s hateful, and so am I”.

The issue here isn’t the decision itself, or Jaime’s choice of words. We know that Jaime isn’t a good man. We know that he’s done awful things for Cersei’s love. And, if we think about it, it makes sense that he wouldn’t be able to leave behind a lifelong co-dependent and unhealthy relationship without looking back, and that he would be driven to return to Cersei’s side when the reality of her impending death hit. The issue is that none of this decision making is presented in the show itself; there was no build up, no foreshadowing. Instead of showing us why this decision was made, the show presents this scene as a shock twist, leaving the viewer with whiplash wondering how Jaime’s story could have taken such an unexpected turn so quickly. The redemption arc that we all thought we were watching was not a redemption arc at all, and don’t think I was alone in finding this revelation deeply unsatisfying.

Let’s leave Jaime for a moment and turn to John Silver. Even for viewers who entered Black Sails without knowing they were watching a prequel to Treasure Island (such as myself!), we can assume that most people have heard of the fictional pirate Long John Silver: the ‘villain’ of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure who embodies what it means to be a “gentleman of fortune”. When we meet clean-shaved, smarmy, two-legged Silver in the pilot most viewers will at least have an idea of the trajectory his arc will take – and that it won’t end with him and Flint skipping off into the sunset hand in hand. We know, because of history, that the pirate rebellion is doomed to fail, that slavery does not end in the West Indies, that Nassau does indeed fall back under English rule, and that piracy is eventually stamped out of New Providence. And we know, because of Treasure Island, that John Silver will end up hunting for Captain Flint’s treasure, while Billy Bones dies from a stroke at the very idea of a visit from Long John and Flint drinks himself to death in Savannah. In essence, we know that we are watching a tragedy.

The genre of tragedy dates back to Ancient Greece, and describes a narrative that presents an examination of human suffering while evoking a sense of catharsis. Aristotle defines tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude … through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [release] of these emotions.” In other words, in order for a tragedy to achieve this state of emotional release, we as the viewer need to both anticipate (or, fear) the resolution and feel sympathy (or, pity) towards the tragic hero. Black Sails does this masterfully. The pathway towards the destruction of Silver and Flint’s partnership has its grounds as early as season 2, before it has even really started to develop, where Silver talks of his fears of being “used and discarded” by Flint. In the finale of season 3 it is made explicit during their conversation before the battle, with Silver interrogating what he sees as the pattern of Flint’s loved ones dying “not just during [their] relationship, but because of it”. Silver finds himself “unnerved by the thought that when this pattern applies itself to [Flint] and [Silver], that [he] will be the end of [Flint]”. As they lock eyes across the water later on in this episode, the setup of their opposition, complicated by the genuine care between them, is complete, and we enter season 4 dreading the crumbling of their relationship. Season 4 dangles this dramatic irony over us; every time Flint mentions the indestructible force of their partnership, the things they can achieve when there is “no daylight” between them; every time Silver mentions that Flint has his “genuine trust and friendship”; every time they both speak of their partnership in the same terms as the love that Silver holds for Madi, “I’m committed to Flint, I’m committed to Madi” / “he is my friend, too”, we dread the moment where this will all change. We may not know how it will play out, but we know it is coming. The “fear” is very much present. As, indeed, is the “pity”. We understand why Silver makes the decision he does, even if we don’t agree with it. The show has taken lengths to track the development of Silver’s ability to care and make himself vulnerable to others; we believe in his love for Madi, and understand why he believes that he is doing the right thing. Silver’s tragic flaw is that in gaining empathy his selfishness moves to encompass those he cares about; he will do dark things to protect them without consideration of their own choices or agency. The finale of Black Sails is difficult, beautiful, and yes, tragic, but we end Silver’s story understanding and perhaps even empathising with the decisions he made, believing him when he says that “this is not what [he] wanted”.

Tragedy vs redemption

John Silver’s story is a tragedy. And I believe that Jaime Lannister’s story is also a tragedy; a deeply flawed man who tries to escape the inevitability of an abusive and unhealthy relationship, only to eventually fall back into this cycle and become consumed by it. The problem is that this wasn’t the story we thought we were watching. The ending of Jamie’s character arc has none of the fear, none of the pity, none of the catharsis of Silver’s, because there was no signposting towards this end. If Jaime’s arc had been treated as a tragedy from the outset then perhaps it would have felt emotionally satisfying rather than rushed and unexpected.

Admittedly, as Jaime is not as central to Game of Thrones as Silver is to Black Sails, the show could not spend as much time detailing his inner world as Black Sails does to the latter. However, if the show had framed Jaime’s story with a sense of tragedy rather than triumph, then his decision to return to Cersei in season 8 would have had the same inevitability as Silver’s betrayal. In season 1 of Game of Thrones, as in the first instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire, Cersei tells Ned Stark that she and Jaime “are more than brother and sister. We shared a womb, came into this world together. We belong together”. However, the show doesn’t include Jaime and Cersei’s later, darker ruminations, that “we will die together as we were born together” (Jaime, ASOS), and “we will leave this world together, as we once came into it” (Cersei, AFFC). Jaime and Cersei’s doomed fate in the books is entangled in a way it never is in the show, and doubly so when you factor in the possibility of Jaime actively causing Cersei’s end due to the valonqar prophecy. In addition to this, if we had seen Jaime leave Cersei earlier in the narrative and then grapple with this decision, showing him struggling to be the man Brienne believes him to be and overcome his past actions, then his failure wouldn’t have seemed so out of the blue. With very little effort or changes on the part of the show, Jaime’s *entire* arc could have been framed in a way that would have made his death a tragically fitting end to his and Cersei’s story.

Jaime and Silver both end their respective narratives in very similar places to when they were introduced, or at least they do on the surface: Jaime unable to leave Cersei even in death, Silver alone and eventually chasing treasure (yes, Madi is still in the picture, but I don’t think we are meant to infer that their future relationship will be a trusting one). However, for Silver, this similarity is only surface deep, for we followed his growth and development and understand the tragedy of his choices. Although Jaime goes through a very similar pattern of growth, the framing of his arc as redemptive means that the unexpected nosedive into tragedy in season 8 doesn’t have the weight or impact that it intends, and we are left without understanding *why* he makes his choices. Jaime’s arc is a failed tragedy that doesn’t fulfil the cathartic requirements of the genre, but with a bit of reframing it could have been as emotionally resonant as Silver’s.

Long story short: watch Black Sails.

#game of thrones #asoaif #Black Sails #jaime lannister #john silver #long john silver #black sails meta #game of thrones meta #also this is just my opinion and i am fully aware i have blind spots when it comes to both of these characters #this is just part of my new agenda to make everyone in my life watch black sails

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arlingtonpark · 5 years

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SNK 113 Review

Sad! Edition

Arlingtonpark presents: SNK 113, a play in three acts.

Act I

Act II

Act III

GIVE ME A BREAK, OKAY? THIS CHAPTER DIDN’T GIVE ME MUCH TO WORK WITH!

This was a more leisurly outing for this arc compared to the previous string of chapters. We get some insight into Zeke’s plan (but not a full elaboration), Levi makes a monkey out of him, and the EFC arrives in Shighanshina. That’s it.

Ironically, this was one of the more action packed chapters, yet it’s not as thrilling as, say, SNK 112, which was mostly our main trio sitting at a table.

Our heroes, sans Eren, have been mostly helpless in the face of Zeke and the EFC’s machinations, and Isayama has pressed this to good, suspense-inducing, effect.

We still don’t know much about Zeke, and why Eren is acting like he is now is still not completely understood. The opposition is opaque and they’ve been on a real winning streak so far. Just like how reports of a serial killer in your neighborhood can put you on edge, our heroes are put on edge by…just everything that’s happened so far, and we feel that gnawing fear by extension.

But now might be a turning point.

For the first time, Zeke/Eren (Zeren?)’s plan has hit a real snag. Now, now things will really start to get interesting. Pieck and Galliard did escape and participate in the Liberio fight, and Gabi and Falco are unexpectedly here on Paradis, but those were hardly setbacks. Detours maybe, but they didn’t threaten arrival at the final destination.

This is different. The plan was to rendezvous at Shighanshina and that’s just not going to happen now. Levi is dragging Zeke around like a monkey on a leash and Eren is none the wiser. And there’s no way for him to know that.

It’s not like they can communicate telepathically. unlike Hange and Levi When the time comes to meet up, Zeke isn’t going to be there. From Eren’s perspective, Zeke may as well have disappeared off the face of the Earth.

The plan apparently was to provoke an attack on Paradis by a coalition of the world’s forces. But this plan also apparently hinges on being able to use the Wall Titans to repel this attack. But that’s out the window too now. Zeren’s plan is in danger of catastrophic failure and at the worst possible time.

The enemy is already here. Pieck is on Paradis, no doubt gathering intelligence. It’s good that Zeke is subdued, but that creates a power vacuum and there’s no one around to fill it.

The legitimate government is facing a legitimacy crisis.

The EFC will be in damage control mode now that their plan is in danger of falling through.

And oh yeah, Marley has already infiltrated the island.

Paradis can easily devolve into chaos, now. Pixis’ government is a leader without much of a following; Eren has popular support. The EFC has a following but their leaders will soon be scrambling to regain control of the situation. And all Marley cares about is killing everyone.

And this raises a very intriguing question: How will Eren react to this?

Like I said, things have mostly gone smoothly for him. Yes, Eren’s had this stone cold demeanor, even in the middle of his fight in Liberio, but really he’s been coasting so far. Things have done nothing but go his way. Now it suddenly isn’t. So how does he react to that?

If SNK 112 is any indication, he won’t handle things well. Eren lost his cool at a backhanded swipe by Armin. And I’m not gonna lie, if that was all I had ever seen of Eren, I would have said he was weak.

Sad, even.

When it comes to Eren, Isayama will probably go the classic shonen villain route. Think Frieza or Cell from DBZ. Calm and cool, but only when they’re in control. Once they lose control, they lose their cool and reveal themselves as the wild animals they always were.

This will probably play into his freedom complex. Eren wanted to free humanity from the titans so they could explore the outside world. He framed it in terms of control. Freedom=control is the equation here.

Not being in control, to him, means not being free, so when he realizes he’s not in control anymore, he’s going to go apeshit.

Like the Trumpian figure that he is, Eren will probably resort to dominance rituals to sooth his own ego.

Floch had better watch out. When the guy at the top is a dominance obsessed lunatic, it doesn’t matter how high up the food chain you are. If you’re not at the top, you’re at the bottom. If my Eren=Trump framework is correct, Eren is going to abuse that to hell and back. He’s going to subject Floch and co. to all manner of degradations.

I honestly wouldn’t mind that, if it’s not extreme. Floch would deserve it.

Where do I even start with Floch?

In the past, I’ve compared the story of SNK to the current political landscape in the US. I don’t think this is intentional, to be clear; it’s just a very amusing parallel.

As leader of the Yeagerists, Floch roughly corresponds to Mark Meadows, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus. The HFC is a band of extremist, Trump-aligned, Republican politicians who openly rebel against their leadership. Meadows is the group’s current chairman.

Floch and Meadows share one overridingly important similarity: neither of them can create; they can only destroy.

John Boehner (pronounced “baner.” Seriously.) was leader of the House Republicans, until he was shit-canned because the Freedom Caucus didn’t like him. Here’s how he described their mindset:

“They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”

That’s basically Floch. He wants to Make Eldia Great Again and he thinks the Wall Titans have a role to play in that, but does he have a plan beyond that? Almost certainly not! That would require building something up, and that is beyond his feeble abilities. He thinks Hange is soft and opposes that. He thinks the military is old fashioned and opposes that.

Is there anything concrete that he supports? He supports using the Wall Titans and he supports Eren’s leadership, but his “game plan” is basically:

Use Wall Titans.

???

ELDIA IS GREAT AGAIN!!1

That’s hardly a plan.

All Floch and his team have accomplished is create chaos and dysfunction.

That’s it.

They instigated a social uprising, decapitated the government, and now? They’re just running around trying to find Zeke. (Even though Zeke and Eren already have a rendezvous point worked out.)

All Floch is good for is blowing stuff up and shitting over everything. But in the words of the great Sam Rayburn:

“Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

Floch is no carpenter. Floch is a coward. This pitifully small boy. This absolute failson. It’s no surprise at all he’s where he’s at.

Floch talks big now, but that’s only because he’s riding high now. I bet he’s the type of person who buckles under even minimal pressure. You all saw how he was during the Shighanshina battle. Everyone kept their composure even as Zeke’s rocks were closing in on them. Except him. He was the first to crack.

My sense is that Floch is not a constitutionally strong person, and he knows it. And he thinks he’s a coward, so we know he doesn’t think well of himself.

That’s the key. That’s why he is so devoted to Eldia.

He can’t feel pride in himself qua himself, so he has to feel pride in himself qua an Eldian. His logic is that if Eldians are strong then he is strong by proxy because he is one of them.

It’s the same thing with Trump supporters. Trump’s base supports him because Trump wants to maintain the racial hierarchy that benefits white people. And Trump’s base supports that because a lot of them are poor, white people. Because even though they don’t have a lot going for them, “at least I’m not black.” There’s little in their lives to be proud of, so they take pride in their race to feel better about themselves.

It’s like the evil version of gay pride.

Gay people take pride in their homosexuality because it’s a form of psychic preservation. They are denigrated for this one aspect of themselves, so they emphasize pride in that aspect to counter the stigma. It’s a way of preserving their sense of self-worth.

People like Floch take pride in their race because they have no self-worth to preserve. They’re empty and sad. Their race is one of the only things they have going for them. So they fight for Eldian greatness because a restored Empire will make them feel all big and strong.

It is utterly pathetic.

That’s one thing Floch and Eren have in common. They’re both sad. From Eren’s sad enslavement to the vague notion of freedom, to Floch’s sad belief that if Eldia is made “great” he’ll be made great in turn. It’s sadness all the way down.

The exemplar of that in this chapter is when Floch confronts Shadis.

It’s hilarious how Shadis calls Floch out on being a sad pissant and Floch tries to prove him wrong, only to prove him right in the process.

Not only does Floch miss, he’s stupid enough to say so out loud. He even explains what he was trying for.

Duuuude!

Just play it off as a warning shot! You’re trying to put up a tough guy front. Don’t admit to having failed spectacularly.

He would have been better off doing that anyway. Hitting Shadis in the foot just for mouthing off also would have proven him right. If you feel the need to shoot someone for mouthing off to you, then yeah, you are, in fact, a sad pissant.

But if it was just a warning shot to the ground around him, then that still would have been excessive, but it wouldn’t make you look insecure as hell.

To quote Game of Thrones:

“We’ve had vicious kings, and we’ve had idiot kings, but I don’t think we’ve ever been cursed with a vicious, idiot king!”

He’s not just vicious. He’s not just an idiot. He’s not even just a vicious idiot. He’s a vicious idiot with power. God help them.

But this idea of insecurity being the root cause of nationalist behavior raises an important question: why are the denizens of Paradis also on board with this nationalist program?

Well, nationalism runs on tribalism, so the people need to care about their Eldianism. Their being Eldians.

And going by that…it might actually be the Survey Corps’ fault.

At the start of the series, the Walldians were apathetic about the outside world. But thanks to the (not unjustified) efforts of the Survey Corps, the Walldians started to care.

Rod’s titan was over twice as big as the Colossal Titan; it loomed over Orvud like a kid looms over a toy cityscape playset. A lot of parallels were made in that sequence to the original Colossal Titan attack. In hindsight, Isayama, in his typically blunt style, was probably motivated by more than a need for a stylistic flourish. He probably did it to impress on the reader what he intended the Walldians to take away from the same event: From their perspective, this was another Shighanshina.

But the ending was different this time.

This was bigger than the first attack. Much bigger. Thousands upon thousands of people died in the first attack and its aftermath. Literally no one died the second time. Rod’s titan was subdued without incident. Awesome, but it also had the effect of inspiring nationalistic pride in the people.

Historia’s plan, very explicitly, was to exploit these nationalist feelings to the Survey Corps’ advantage. Stopping a second Shighanshina created a sense of communal unity among the Walldians. The plan was to encourage and then use those feelings to “stabilize the situation” as Historia herself put it.

And it worked, only it worked too well. Now those nationalist feelings have carried over to the Marley conflict to deleterious effect.

And then there’s the Wall Maria operation. That was described by the narrator like this:

“The area within Wall Maria represented one third of the land humanity had left. When the territory was lost five years ago, the loss of human life and property was massive. And, as those who remained inside the two walls quickly realized, those losses were only the beginning. It seemed wrong for us to continue living. Whether humanity could survive another day was out of human hands. Everything was now up to the titans. Because humanity had no way of defeating them. But, that day, one boy gripped the dagger in his heart and used it to kill a titan, stomping its massive head into the ground. How did the humans who saw that sight feel? Some were filled with pride. Some were filled with hope. Some were filled with rage. But all of them screamed. Now, if Wall Maria is taken back, what scream will fill humanity’s hearts?”

The term for the “scream” the narrator is describing here is “nationalistic fervor.” The Wall Maria operation inspired further feelings of nationalism in the people. And again, those feelings have carried over.

This is a case study in unintended consequences. They wanted humanity to fight, now humanity is fighting and it’s backfiring spectacularly. The people are out for blood. Only this time the blood doesn’t evaporate without a trace.

It’s very revealing how Floch acts towards Shadis compared to Hange.

Hange didn’t have a very high opinion of Shadis the last time we saw them in a room together, but they still stood up for him. Even when they’re pissed at someone, they still don’t lose sight of the humanity of that someone.

Floch also has a low opinion of Shadis. He ordered him beaten for no reason. Because Floch is a sad, maladjusted, man-child. He sees the world in black and white terms. If you support him, you’re golden. If you don’t, you’re not even human.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Floch actually gets off on abusing whatever power he has over people. Being powerful is a high he doesn’t get to experience often, so don’t be surprised of he savors the exercising of it.

So I’ve noticed that the Survey Corps is still training recruits to fight titans. Who don’t exist anymore.

Ooookay.

Where is Isayama going with this?

Floch cites the stagnation in Survey Corps tactics as a reason why Eldia isn’t great. Isayama isn’t trying to both-sides this debate is he?

Floch is an asshole and his movement is repugnant. He’s a right-wing fucking nationalist. But it seems Isayama is trying to send the message that he’s not wrong.

What is it with this series and this schizophrenic approach to right-wing nationalism? The story has condemned it in certain moments, but when it comes to condemning the actual leaders of this movement, Isayama equivocates.

Floch is an asshole, BUT he’s actually right because the Survey Corps really is backwards thinking and in need of new leadership.

Eren is an asshole, BUT he’s actually right because the rumbling *is* necessary to protect Paradis and everyone else was just slow to accept this.

This isn’t just a case of the villains having a point. The key in situations like that is to show they have a point, but that their methods are obscene. Important to that is showing an actual alternative to those methods. Putting forth an alternative is important because it doesn’t matter how horrific Eren or Floch’s actions are, if it’s the only way to proceed then the argument can be made they are doing the right thing.

When the villain has a point, they have correctly identified a problem, but have incorrectly identified the solution.

With Eren and co. the story doesn’t just depict them as having correctly identified the problem. Their proposed solution is depicted as being at least somewhat correct too.

That’s a problem because it means Isayama is granting undue legitimacy to a repugnant, real world ideology.

Them being assholes should be a feature, not a bug. The bug being that they have a point. But the way Isayama has set things up, it’s that them having a point is the feature and their jackassery is the bug.

It all amounts to the story criticizing the nonessential aspects of this movement while leaving the substantive aspects intact.

At this point we’ll all need gas masks real soon because the smoke just keeps piling up.

The last thing of note is Zeke. Apparently he doesn’t get off on pain and suffering. Who knew.

We are apparently going to finally get a peak (you know it’s only going to be a peak) at his backstory and mindset next chapter.

Zeke worrying about his glasses, which belonged to what seems to have been a childhood friend of his, is obviously supposed to signal that Zeke can in fact empathize with people.

I am…warily looking forward to this. The ending blurb teases that he does in fact have a reason for what he’s doing. What I hope Isayama will do, because I think it would be a cool twist, is reveal that Zeke’s motives and plan is merely internally logical, but from an outside perspective, his plan is still totally batshit insane and maybe even nonsensical.

Because that’s how it is with people. People are rational actors, but all that means is that they respond to incentives and harms as they themselves weigh them in accordance with their own internal value system.

In other words, people act in a way that is always internally logical but not always truly logical. The prisoner’s dilemma is a classic example of this. Everyone acts rationally and because of that everyone loses.

How interesting would it be if Zeke’s motives only make sense to him, but are still, in a way, understandable?

The next chapter will end the second volume of this arc. Based on past chapters in a similar position, it will probably end on some event that rapidly escalates the conflict. My guess is that it’ll end on Marley launching its attack on Paradis.

SNK 114 awaits.

#shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #floch forster #snk 113 #spoilers

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anistarrose · 6 years

Text

Some Sunny Day - Ch. 1: Prologue (Gravity Falls Same Coin Theory)

Summary: Time isn’t linear, Stan has a catchy piano tune stuck in his head, and blue flames threaten to consume the peace that the Pines family has found.

Warnings: None for this chapter

Next chapter

AO3

(Based off the Same Coin Theory by @dubsdeedubs and @renmorris, a longtime favorite theory of mine!)

The gryphon they encountered on the rocky Alaskan island was nothing like those that Stanford had met before. The near-omniscience was impressive enough, but given what he knew about gryphon vocal cords, Ford almost thought the fluent English was even more extraordinary. Almost.

“Stanford and Stanley Pines,” it addressed them, not moving its beak at all. “Though you’ve both gone by other names at different times — most notably in Stanley’s case, of course.”

It gently floated to the ground, then folded up its wings and began to groom (preen?) its chest fur.

“I’d appreciate it if you put your weapons away,” it told them. “Though I don’t blame you for that sort of reaction. I am something an outlier among my family.”

It spoke the word family in a way that made Ford suspect it was referring to its entire species. And seeing as this gryphon was the only one they’d met that hadn’t tried to eat them, Ford was inclined to agree with it.

“Of course. We apologize,” Ford told it, holstering his gun. He noticed that the gryphon was a bit smaller than the ones he’d seen before, though not drastically, and its wings were a darker dappled brown instead of the usual beige. Were the biological differences a result of its unique abilities, he wondered, or were those abilities an adaptation made in response to the disadvantages the biological differences caused? Being nothing if not a scientist, he couldn’t help but ask.

“If you don’t mind the question, what is it that makes you you? What is the cause of this outlier status?”

The gryphon tilted its head at him like a dog expecting a treat. Ford supposed it didn’t get very many chances to talk about its talents — or talk to anyone, really — in this barren environment.

“You could probably trace it all back to my precognizance,” it told him. “I can see into many different times, but knowledge of the future was what changed me most.”

Stan narrowed his eyes. “Oh yeah? Give us an example of this future knowledge.”

Ford could relate to Stan’s skepticism. Most people would have believed it without a second thought — the gryphon had addressed them by name, after all — but being raised by a fake psychic tended to make you suspicious of such things.

“Gladly,” the gryphon replied. “First of all: there is a reunion awaiting in your future.”

Aware of the usual cold reading tricks, Stan and Ford stayed silent, careful not to give the gryphon any extra information.

“You’ll return to a familiar situation, but you aren’t trapped in a cycle — there once was a cycle, but you’ve already broken out of it. You will, however, reminisce on past mistakes, and the correction of those mistakes. And you’ll both find answers to questions you didn’t know you had — at least not consciously.”

It paused. “Is that sufficient? I don’t want to go and spoil everything, you know.”

Stan and Ford exchanged a look.

“The ‘reunion’ thing means spendin’ another summer with the kids, I guess?” Stan suggested.

“Probably.” They had indeed been planning to reunite with the kids in Gravity Falls next month. “Returning to a familiar place… that’s Gravity Falls, of course, but I have no idea what cycle we used to be trapped in.”

“Petty arguments and grudges?”

“Fair enough, I suppose. But what about the questions we didn’t know we had?”

“Well, right now we don’t know we have ‘em, duh.”

Ford sighed. The predictions were vague, but the more specific parts seemed plausible. Only the passage of time would allow him to seriously assess their accuracy… though Stan, for his part, had taken the whole thing (relatively) seriously, which meant he probably believed it was real. And given how skilled Stan was at spotting scams, his gut instinct was more than good enough for Ford, even as unscientific as it was.

“That’s sufficient. We believe you,” Ford told the gryphon. “But if you don’t mind, how exactly did you gain this ability? Is it inherent, or acquired?”

The gryphon spread its wings — preparing to take flight, Ford realized. He knew gryphons didn’t like staying in one place for too long, but he’d hoped this particular one would stick around for a bit longer — he just had so many questions…

“Time isn’t linear,” it said, “you of all people should realize that.”

(Was it just Ford’s imagination, or did the gryphon look briefly at Stanley?)

“That means that seeing the future really isn’t all that difficult. A lot of people can do it — at least to some extent — if they’re taught the right way. But if you must know — well, I can’t go spilling all of my secrets, but I will leave you with this: there is a being I am indebted to in many ways, a being that itself sees many things that from your perspective are yet to come.”

For a second, Ford was afraid that that was all they were going to get, that the gryphon would fly away and leave them with only questions and no answers. But then, it added:

“Stanford Pines, I believe you’ve heard of the Axolotl during your travels?”

And with that, it took to the sky and didn’t look back.

Well, that was an answer that just raised more questions in its place, Ford thought, his mind whirling as Stan gave him a concerned look. But I’ll take it. I’ll definitely take it.

“Ford? Earth to Ford?” Stan asked. He may have repeated it a couple times; Ford wasn’t really sure. “I’m guessing you do know something?”

“Yes, something. You could say that,” Ford finally answered. “Let’s get back to the boat and pray we have an Internet connection. There are a lot of things I want look into.”

***

“We’ll meet again…”

Stan was by no means a good singer, but Ford thought he’d gotten used to it over the past eight months. And really, he was used to it — it was just the song that he couldn’t bear to listen to.

“Don’t know where, don’t know when…”

He was trying to ignore it, to not make a big deal out of something he shouldn’t have cared about, not after the better part of a year had passed, but —

“But I know we’ll meet again, some —”

“Could you shut it already?” Ford snapped, slamming his fist onto the rail of the Stan O’ War II with more force than he’d intended and instantly regretting it. Not so much because it hurt his hand (though it was a little painful), but because he worried how Stan might react to it — not well, that was for certain.

But Stan just gave him a look that was more concerned than hurt. “Whoa, Poindexter, I’ve been singin’ for about six seconds. Somethin’ wrong?”

Ford looked down. “I’m sorry, I just… I don’t like that song. Do you think you could sing something else?” He could have elaborated on why that song unnerved him so much, and Stan probably would have understood right away, but Ford had stayed up unhealthily late the past night researching and wasn’t in the mood to talk about Weirdmageddon.

And Stan couldn’t have possibly have believed him that it was that simple — Ford never snapped at him unless he did something remarkably stupid or unintentionally triggered a painful memory, and Stan wasn’t doing anything remotely stupid or risky at the moment — but he didn’t question Ford.

“Meh, my voice is kinda tired anyway.” It was a blatant lie, and the attempt to change the topic that he followed it up with was just as blatant. “So, you figure out anything else about that salamander god?”

Ford accepted the escape route Stan had offered him. “Well, technically I suppose I have, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.”

They’d spent three days sailing south since the gryphon encounter, and despite their Internet connection holding out far better than Ford had ever dreamed of, he’d hadn’t been able to find very many things that he hadn’t already known.

“It manifested itself to countless groups across the multiverse, I’m sure of that, but it seems that the only surviving records in our dimension were created by the Aztecs. And you know I’ve already read nearly everything there is to read about their god Xolotl.”

“Yeah, god of ‘twins and deformities.’ You’ve had that obsession since, like, middle school.” Stan tried not to pronounce the names of the god or the amphibian if he could avoid them. “And you even had one of the pink frilly guys in your lab.”

“I wish we could visit Mexico to conduct more research of our own,” Ford mused. “I have a vague idea for a summoning ritual, but I need more…” He paused as Stan’s words sank in.

“Yeah, too bad the kids will never forgive us if we skip out on them this summer to search for a magical fish lizard,” Stan told him, not realizing anything was wrong. “And I can’t remember what name my all my arrest warrants in Mexico were put out under…”

“Stanley, wait. You said you found an axolotl in my lab?”

Stan blinked. “Yeah, the one in the fish tank. I was afraid I was gonna accidentally kill him or somethin’ after you… ya know, fell through the portal, ‘cause I didn’t know what to feed him or how to clean his tank, but the little guy stuck around almost until you got back. You… you knew about it, right?”

“Almost until I got back?!” Ford asked. “Axolotls can live for fifteen years if they’re cared for well, but twice that?!”

“Yeah, I always wondered if you did some weird spell on it or somethin’. But… you really didn’t know about it?”

“I never kept an axolotl in the Shack,” Ford confirmed. “I honestly would have loved to have one as a pet, but I didn’t have the time to take care of one. They require a specific type of food, a specific temperature range, a specific type of materials in their tank… I can’t imagine any way one could have gotten there by natural means!”

“Would it freak you out more if I told you it just disappeared a couple days after the kids showed up last summer? Literally nothin’ left behind, like it dissolved in the tank or somethin’?”

Ford slammed his hand against his forehead. “Stanley, I can’t believe you had a ghost axolotl in your house for three decades and never brought it up until now.”

“Hey, how am I supposed to know what’s normal for pink salamanders? They could have all lived that long and disappeared like that, and I would have sounded like an idiot for bringing it up!”

Ford shook his head. “It has to all be connected!” For about the seventh time, he regretted not bringing a bulletin board and red string with him on the Stan O’ War II. “Your axolotl, the god Xolotl, the countless references I’ve heard across the multiverse to a benevolent creature that guards against evil and patronizes those with prophetic ability…”

“So… you really think it was the Axolotl in that tank all those years?”

“I think it’s quite probable. But… just what would the Axolotl want with you, Stanley?”

***

Ford had fretted over the Axolotl for several more minutes before they encountered what had to have been some sort of cursed seagull — no normal bird could possibly crap that much, right? — and their attention was very quickly drawn elsewhere.

As they were cleaning up the aftermath of the attack, Ford mentioned something about the Axolotl probably knowing that Stan was destined to defeat Bill, but he quickly abandoned the thought to continue cursing out seagulls in every alien language he knew. The explanation must have at least partially satisfied him, though, since when they went ashore that evening Ford fell asleep almost immediately in the hotel.

“I’d still like to do more research, of course,” he told Stan before completely losing consciousness. “Maybe we could sail south after this summer, visit the region where the Axolotl manifested himself as Xolotl. But I do think it’s likely that he paid you a visit knowing about your eventual role in Cipher’s downfall.”

Stan wasn’t as satisfied, for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down. Rare were the times when Stan was the twin lying awake at night, thinking about the day’s unsolved mysteries, but tonight, for whatever reason, he’d transformed into the resident sleepless conspiracy theorist.

He had a weird gut feeling telling him there was something he was missing — forgetting? — about the Axolotl, and he’d learned to trust his gut over the years — it had saved him so many times he’d lost track. His subconscious apparently knew a hell of a lot more than he did — though that really wasn’t much of an achievement, he figured.

There was a weird sense of urgency to his gut feeling today. Stan wasn’t sure he’d be able to describe it if he’d tried. There was just a hard-to-explain emotion — not really fear, he didn’t think, but definitely not a positive emotion, either — that rose up in his chest whenever he thought of the future: of returning to Gravity Falls, of reuniting with Dipper and Mabel and everyone else, of actually traveling to Mexico with Ford one day to learn more about and maybe even meet the Axolotl.

Big things are coming, he thought. And I can’t stop them.

Then he thought, Come on, Stan, you’re getting as paranoid as Sixer. Next thing you’re going to be keeping a diary all written in code.

So he ignored his gut and let himself fall asleep, a familiar tune about reunions and clouds and sunlight running through his head just as it had been ever since leaving that barren Alaskan island.

L wrog brx wkdw zh’g phhw djdlq Vdlg L glgq’w nqrz zkhuh ru zkhq. Exw qrz wkh vxq lv vklqlqj Vr pdbeh zh’oo uhdolch L’p qrw frplqj edfn RQH GDB — L’yh EHHQ edfn iru rxu zkroh olyhv.

Thanks for reading, feedback is appreciated as always!

I’m aiming for weekly updates, but I can’t promise anything, especially if I’m struck with inspiration for other unrelated one-shots and the like. I have the whole plot planned out, and completed fic will probably be about 14 total chapters, plus or minus two.

#gravity falls #same coin theory #stanley pines #stanford pines #bill cipher #the axolotl #fic: some sunny day #rosalia writes fic #i am truly excited to share this fic #(partly bc it's the first multichapter fic i'm posting #and partly because i'm just so excited about this theory/concept!)#this is just the prologue so it's just setting up themes and foreshadowing #but (bill voice) big things are coming #you can't stop me #seriously the next chapter is almost done #and i am very proud and hyped to share it

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vrepit-sals · 6 years

Text

Title: When I’m not the only one Characters: Pidge, team Voltron, the Holt family Pairings: None Tags: space family, found family, trans girl pidge Word Count: 4055 This was my piece for @pidgevoltronzine, you can get a copy of the free zine here. This fic is available on a03 here

They're still standing in the middle of the hallway, when an indignant shout comes from far away, reverberating down the castle corridors at a much higher decibel than the late hour would warrant.

"Keith is your favourite brother? I bought you a video game!" ______

Pidge learns that blood is not a prerequisite for family.

She's sitting on the kitchen counter, sprinkling chocolate chips into a bowl while Matt stirs the mixture with a wooden spoon. They're almost done, and in half an hour she knows they'll have freshly baked peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies.

She feels grown up, being allowed to help in the kitchen with only her brother's supervision. She's wearing her brand new green dress, the one she'd spent half-an-hour spinning in that morning, trying to memorise the unfamiliar way the fabric swept across her legs.

Her mother had pulled her hair up into pigtails and smiled at her from behind a camera as she twirled, then bundled her up in her arms. She'd received a kiss on the cheek and revelled in hearing her name from her mother’s lips. She'd never felt safer.

Her favourite cookies are like the cherry on top of the cake, the celebration of something she's wanted for years and only just attained.

Her brother makes a dramatic reprimand when she eats a chocolate chip and opens his mouth wide, swooping for and missing the chip she throws.

She giggles as he bends down and pops it in his mouth anyway, citing the five second rule. She continues to watch, eagerly accepting when Matt offers her the chance to stir the bowl.

He smiles down at her as she works, and declares the cookies complete with a flourish.

It's as he's pulling out the baking paper that she realises their vital mistake.

"We forgot to add the pidge of love!" She says, ready to clamber off the counter in order to grab the mysterious ingredient that their mother adds to everything she cooks.

Matt stops and stares at her for a second before he starts to laugh.

"Yes, we definitely can't forget that!" he says, wiping away a tear before showing her how to do a sprinkling motion, adding their blessing to the mixture.

He hands her back the wooden spoon.

"Better make sure it's stirred in properly."

He grins at her and she smiles back, sweeping the spoon through the dough in the figure 8 motions their mother had taught her.

They scoop out the dough with their hands and roll it into balls between their palms. Matt hands her the spoon to lick as he leaves to ask their father to put the tray in the oven for them. He lifts her off the counter and lets her pick the TV show they watch while they wait for the cookies to be done.

It's the best birthday she's ever had.

"They look great, Pidge," Matt says when their father places the cookies on a heatproof mat, batting his children's hands away from the hot tray.

She looks at her brother and tries to raise one eyebrow the same way their mother does.

"Pidge?"

"Yeah," Matt says, ruffling her hair and laughing as she squeals, "because you're our own little 'pidge of love'. Our most important ingredient."

She smiles at him, and he grins back, a certain mischief in the quirk of his lips that she can't seem to place.

In eight years she'll be telling him she hates the nickname, a slightly embarrassing story of childhood ignorance and Matt's warped sense of humour. In ten years it'll be one of the few connections to her family and planet that she still has, and she'll hold it tight with no plan to ever let it go.

But for now her chest feels lighter than ever. A new nickname, her first dress and her favourite cookies.

Life couldn't possibly get better.

Coran looks tired.

He always does, at least to some degree. Pidge doesn’t think she's ever seen him without loss and exhaustion lingering behind his eyes.

All of them need a spa day. Sometimes it feels like the entire team is running on empty. But Coran and Allura have been fighting far longer than the paladins have. They don't have a home waiting for them when this is all over.

Sometimes Pidge can see Coran's uncertainty in the crack between his smile.

But he hides it well. He wanders over to her research as if he's been resting all day, without a care in the world. In actuality, Pidge knows he's been cleaning the castle, preparing training sessions, assisting Allura with recon and checking up on all of them and helping when he can.

She wants to tell him to go have a nap. She wants to give him something to ease the burden, even just a little.

"I found the next link in the chain," she says instead.

It's taken three days and feels like nothing. Coran still smiles like it's progress.

"Oh?" he asks. He leans forward to look at the screen over her shoulder.

"The ship Matt was on docked near the Vaekla system, and unloaded cargo before jumping into hyperspace," she says, "it's been stationed for combat ever since. The logs don't mention the prisoners, but they must have been moved around the same time as the cargo."

The one thing that seems crystal clear in all this is that the Galra value prisoners as less than worthless. They are shepherded from ship to ship in a seemingly endless chain until a more permanent prison happens to be on the ship's route.

They’re rarely listed in logs at all, and where they are there’s merely the number of prisoners and a date. She’s struggled to keep track of which group Matt is in, and the disquiet of her mind whispers that she might not even be on the right track.

"The Vaekla system, that sounds familiar," Coran says.

"It one of the biggest Galran cargo hubs on this side of the galaxy."

Coran nods and taps his finger against his chin.

"Do you know the ship they were transferred to?"

"The base has enough resources to hold prisoners for about a week at a time. I've just finished compiling a list of all the ships that went through there within a week of the prisoners arriving. I'm just about to start cross-referencing their cargo, logs and destination routes to come up with some likely candidates."

Just saying the sentence drops a weight on whatever small piece of optimism she still had going. She thinks of how little of the cross referencing can be done automatically, and the seemingly endless list of ships.

Coran just nods and pats her on the shoulder. His presence does make her feel a little better, for all that she knows he'll give her some words of encouragement before going back to his own duties.

"Well then, we'd better get started."

Coran plops down into the seat next to her and pulls up a monitor. Pidge looks at him in shock for a moment before distributing the list between them.

The time passes eons faster than it did that morning. Coran tells her a story about King Alfor and a rather forward Torian diplomat as they work, and Pidge's stomach hurts from all the laughing by the time they take a break for dinner.

The mind is such an inefficient memory storage system.

Pidge knows that she had an album of family pictures back at home. She had backups on external hard drives and CDs and physical copies stashed in just about every room.

When Matt and her Dad disappeared, she swore she would never forget them. She would never lose the family photos of them, no matter what natural disaster or piece of bad luck might strike. She knew one day she would use the photographs to find them.

She'd brought the picture of Matt with her to the Garrison and to space beyond. But she'd left the pictures of her father at home. She'd thought one photo she could pass off as coincidence, but any more would make her real identity obvious.

She'd been just paranoid enough, but in a completely unhelpful direction.

Some days she tries to picture her father's face, and she can feel her memory falter. It takes her brain minutes to construct something that resembles him, but when she tries to zoom in, to see the quirk of his cheesy grin, it blurs away to nothing.

She sees the uncanny valley whenever she tries to think hard about home.

She doesn't mean to bother Shiro on the bad days. It's not like it's a conscious thing, she'll just be getting some food goo and he'll be sitting at the table with a cup of what Coran swears sounds just like green tea. Or else she'll be training with the rest of the team, and he'll notice that the bags under her eyes have multiplied overnight.

She knows he sees what's happening, because always, without fail, he'll start talking about her family.

He never asks her about it directly, but the tales from the Kerberos mission remind her of things that have slipped her mind.

How Matt sang Lady Gaga at the top of his lungs when the world felt too heavy. Her father's habit of accidentally stealing other people's combs. The stories flesh out her family in her mind's eye, transforming them back from vague recollections into actual people.

People she can see again.

People she is going to.

Some days space seems intent to rip the past from her. To fog her memories and cloud her perspective, to block her from anything but the battles and missions and death.

But she knows that whenever she starts to forget what's important, Shiro will make sure she remembers.

Allura pulls her aside after a debriefing for another diplomatic mission. Pidge expects something to be wrong or there to be extra work to do.

Sometimes Pidge feels like she manages to accidently insult the princess every time they talk. Allura always accepts her apologies with grace, and although they've become closer over the past few months, Pidge still feels the need to hold herself back somewhat, before her tongue manages to undo all their progress.

Perhaps that's why missions and training still seem to dominate their conversations.

"What's up Allura?" she asks, already half calculating what she could accomplish for Allura before they land planetside.

"This new mission doesn't require us to wear our armour, but we will need something more formal than our regular attire. I was wondering if you'd like to borrow a dress for the occasion?"

Pidge stares at her for a moment. She's suddenly transported back to that day all those years ago. The hallway mirror, fabric whooshing around her legs and a feeling of peace she never expected to find.

Allura's face shifts with her silence.

"Of course, if you'd prefer I'm sure Coran can find you a suit-"

"No," Pidge cuts her off in her haste, "I'd love to borrow something. Thank you."

She can't keep a grin off her face. Allura returns it before leading her to her bedroom, where they spend the afternoon going through her princess-sized closet.

Allura seems to have stories about every item of clothing: tales of tall trees and impromptu play-fights that ripped holes in ball gowns; diplomatic missions to planets that may no longer exist; soft fabric for dresses worn around the castle, on days she could forgo her royal duties and just be a child.

Pidge feels a little foolish trying on dresses Allura wore when she was 10, but as soon as the fabric goes over her head she feels a sigh of relief spread through her.

The clothes she normally wears are one of the only connections to Earth she still has. But these dresses, alien as they are, remind her of another kind of home.

Allura retires to the edge of her bed and comments on each dress Pidge tries. For some she is loud and exuberant, quoting lines she's heard from the team like "walk walk fashion baby" or Altean slang that she assures is positive.

For others she can't help but laugh at the outdated buttons that apparently clash terribly by current standards and silhouettes that are unflattering in every way.

Together they create a shortlist. Then, one by one they eliminate options until a winner is found.

The dress is a deep emerald with a high neckline, finishing just below her knees. On Altea it would have been used for lunch events or as less formal day wear, but Pidge has never felt more like royalty.

The weight of the dress is comforting and familiar, and she could easily fit her bayard, along with any other useful gadgets in one of its almost-impossible-for-their-sheer-size pockets.

Allura looks at her in confusion when she discovers the pockets and promptly sticks her hands in them, twirling around with gleeful shouts of their existence.

"Of course it has pockets. What kind of dress doesn't?"

Pidge turns and stares at her with the kind of reverence that thus far has been reserved only for technology.

"Altea must have been a wonderful place."

She sees Allura smile with a far-away look in her eyes.

"Yes, it really was," she smiles at Pidge like that dress is helping keep the past alive.

Even when they're done choosing an outfit for the meeting, they continue going through the wardrobe. This time Allura joins her, pulling on gifts from diplomats of other planets and piling scarves around her neck.

Pidge laughs at the look it creates and Allura strikes a pose, prompting Pidge to do the same.

When they've finally expended every item in the closet, Allura picks up a large pile of dresses Pidge hadn't even noticed her making, and tells Pidge to lead the way back to her room.

Pidge looks at her in disbelief for a moment, but can't help the smile pulling at her lips.

"Are you sure you don't mind me wearing them?" she asks as she pushes aside the various electronics she'd stacked in the clothing-devoid closet.

"Of course, hand-me-downs are an important part of Earthen bonding," Allura grins at her, before looking slightly sheepish, "or is this like the time Lance told me that the middle finger was a sign of great admiration and respect?"

Pidge laughs at the memory, and all the healing pods Lance had to clean in punishment.

"No, that's right. Just, thank you."

Pidge isn't sure if she'll ever be able to express how much she means it. Allura just smiles at her and hefts all the dresses into her closet in one graceful motion Pidge could never hope to replicate.

Pidge is wearing one of her new dresses when she enters the lounge and gets comfy on one of the big couches. She has her laptop with her, but there's no pressing intel to translate or interpret. She fiddles with a few of her passion projects, but can't seem to focus.

Lance had greeted her when she walked in, and he's sitting on the next couch over, working on a jumper using sharpened sticks that were once part of some Altean extreme sport.

Pidge finds herself continually distracted by the soft clack of the needles.

It takes her back to when her mother would sit next to her father on the couch, knitting squares for their local charity group during family movie night. She'd always promised Pidge that she'd teach her one day.

But life was always too busy, and then Kerberos happened and family movie nights stopped. The clack of needles and any sense of life drained from their house.

She stares blankly at her laptop screen and imagines bringing her mother back a blanket, one knitted in space. She imagines knitting with her during future family movie nights. She imagines the warmth of yarn slipping through her fingers feeling like her mother's hugs.

She turns her head towards Lance and he looks up from his knitting. He grins easily at her, one eyebrow raised in an unasked question.

"Can you teach me how to knit?" she asks.

Lance lets out a happy of bark of laughter, and all but throws his needles to the side as he exclaims.

"Of course I can! You know, I am an excellent teacher."

Pidge rolls her eyes at him, but the smile that overtakes Lance's face is contagious. He ruffles her hair as he leaves to grab another pair of needles and some yarn.

Pidge's first square looks more like a dilapidated rhombus. Her second isn't much better.

But Lance just has this proud look on his face as he examines them. He weaves her tales of all the holey scarves he gave his mother for Christmas when he was small.

Pidge smiles as she casts on her third attempt.

"Hey Pidge, can I get a hand with something?"

She looks up at where Hunk is smiling at her from the entrance of the room. She'd originally come in to the lounge room to knit. The blanket she's making is almost halfway done, and she preemptively misses it whenever she works late into the night without its warmth around her shoulders.

But her laptop had sat and stared at her. Taunting her with puzzles and uncracked codes that she's never been able to resist.

Hunk's voice snaps her out of what the other's affectionately call her 'technology haze', and the laptop all but whines at her as she puts it down to follow Hunk into the hallway.

They don't seem to be following the familiar path to their joint workshop, and Pidge frowns.

"What do you need help with?"

Hunk just turns to her with a secretive grin.

"Just a little something I've been working on," he says, pausing at the end of corridor for a moment before his eyes light up in recognition and he leads them left.

Secrecy isn't like Hunk. They share information on their projects as easily as breathing, exchanging ideas with barely a need to speak. She and Hunk are the only ones on the ship to truly appreciate the intricacies of what they do, and she holds her comrade in arms in high regard.

She manages to hold her tongue for almost a minute before the curiosity gets the better of her.

"Is it problems with the real-time Galra tracker?" she asks. Hunk lets out a laugh.

"No."

"Is it time to re-scramble the communication frequencies?"

"Not for another few days."

She hums and taps a finger against her chin.

"It's not modifications to Yellow?"

"Yes."

Pidge's eyes light up and Hunk looks at her with a grin.

"It's not," he says, and picks up the pace, laughing at her grumbling.

They continue winding down the castle corridors, watching them get smaller and darker. Hunk leads her to a part of the ship she's never been before, stretching hallways of doors leading to what she assumes are guest rooms their team of seven have no use for.

Hunk seems to stop at one of them at random, but when he flicks his wrist to open the door, it asks for a passcode. As if it were the armoury, or the keeper of a great secret.

When the door opens Pidge can see a faint glow emitting from the room. She takes in the mass of contraptions taking over half the floorspace, all leading up to a projection of a familiar start-up screen.

Killbot Phantasm 1 gazes back at her.

Her eyes are fixed on the game she's spent months trying and failing to play. A grin takes over her face and she swears she starts to tear up a little.

"I was thinking maybe later I could get some help carrying it up to one of the larger common rooms," Hunk says, as she stares at the screen in a daze, "but for now do you want to try multiplayer?"

Pidge takes the offered controller and asks herself how she ever got so lucky.

"Oh it's on," she says. Hunk cheers and presses start.

Pidge is seriously considering just snuggling down and sleeping in the cold, hard metal of her chair.

Her bed feels light-years away, an insurmountable distance. Her limbs ache at the thought and her mind lies, tells her that surely if she just lets her eyes drift shut, she'll be able to muster up the energy to make the journey. Just five minutes is all she'll need.

The part of her brain that's holding the fort together, that's somehow still functioning after 12 hours piloting her lion and running through Galra battlecruisers and three days before that working around the clock to decode the intel for this stealth mission, feels like this information is somehow sketchy. But she can't gather enough evidence to refute it.

She's just starting to sink into sweet, sweet rest when someone grabs her wrists and hoists them over their shoulders. After a jostle, she can feel hands under her legs securing her in place, pressed up against someone's back.

Then, despite any effort on her part, she's moving.

Pidge musters the last of her energy to pry open her eyes. Apparently the thing scratching her nose is actually long, black hair.

"Thanks Keith," she says, some part of her feeling their slow, lumbered movements and reminding her that Keith must be almost as tired as she is.

Or maybe not, the way he pulls his arms to boost her further up his back, and the smile she can hear when he says "No problem Pidge."

Her mind marks her current situation as ‘safe’ and resumes its descent into slumber. Just as she's about to slip away, Pavlovian conditioning pulls a final phrase from her lips.

"You're my favourite brother."

Keith pauses, and Pidge sluggishly realises that there was something unusual about that statement.

She's said it a thousand times, whenever Matt would give her the remote without a fight, or team up with her in Trivial Pursuit, or when the night got late and he'd piggyback her to her room, a million worlds away but exactly like this.

Every time Matt's response was exactly the same:

"I'll call it an achievement when I'm not the only one you've got."

It looks like he may have to start doing just that.

Or not, because apparently Keith has swept the title out from under him.

And part of Pidge wants to cry, because it feels like every day her Earth family drifts further and further away. And part of her wants to laugh as she tries to imagine the look on her mother's face when she introduces her to her new uncle and sister and four new brothers. Because she has to believe that one day she'll bring her families together.

Even if her team never consider her family back.

They're still standing in the middle of the hallway, when an indignant shout comes from far away, reverberating down the castle corridors at a much higher decibel than the late hour would warrant.

"Keith is your favourite brother? I bought you a video game!"

The voice is easily identifiable as Lance's, and Pidge can imagine him in his pyjamas, half a face mask applied, his features pulled into put-on disgust.

"Yeah, well I set it up!" comes a deep voice from even further in the ship. Hunk's deep tones betray far more humour than Lance's, and Lance squawks.

"I taught you how to knit!"

"I helped you decode 20 million lines of cargo logs!"

Pidge can almost see Hunk's teasing smile and Lance's over-exaggerated hand movements.

"The point is: your favourite brother is Keith?!" Lance yells in indignation.

A laugh is ripped from of Pidge's throat, and it mingles with laughter coming from Keith before drifting back down the hallway. It's answered by two over the top declarations of future retribution sent Keith's way.

When Keith drops her off at her door, she hugs him tight as she wishes him goodnight. His cheeks are red and wet, but a smile threatens to overtake his face as he returns the hug, his arms gentle but firm around her shoulders.

Then she's in her room, kicking off her shoes but otherwise letting nothing distract her from the sweet comfort of her bed. She pulls the blankets up to her neck and lets herself snuggle into the warmth which seems to be emanating from her heart.

And perhaps it's been building up over months, but it still hits her with surprising clarity.

For the first time, the Castleship truly feels like home.

#voltron #vld #pidge #safepidge #space family #found family #team voltron #sustenance provided by vrepit sals

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imagine-fight-write · 4 years

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RANDOM - BANANA FISH DISCUSSION - I’M SO VAGUE

Hello, Everyone!

No excuse for this being late, it just is.

Note: This is just me rambling about a certain subject in relation to Banana Fish which is totally vague (but that’s probably all in my head.)

If you’re enjoying my Banana Fish Review series, Vol. 1: Part 3 will be up either later today or Saturday!

Unless Time sabotages me again. They might.

* I like to think of Time as having a female persona. What do you think?

Anyway . . .

This one is more in-depth musings about a certain subject & character, rather than analysis of a scene. It’s deeply vague & confusing (probably because I’m thinking too deep about it. But I don’t care. It’s fun to theorize.) If you want to continue reading delightful gushing about scenes & characters in Banana Fish in chronological order (mostly), please check out Part 3 of my Banana Fish review.

Determining Ash’s sexuality is marvelously tricky. *Also Eiji’s, now I think of it.

So far as I know, Eiji hasn’t have any / very little romantic or sexual experience (or is he simply shy? Who knows?). Thus, he can’t know who he likes & neither can the reader (for certain.) His attraction to Ash is vague enough that valid arguments can be made for anything from friends to soul mates to lovers. Isn’t it wonderfully maddening?

Otaku, She Wrote has a great article about this, here:

https://otakushewrote.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/more-than-friends-more-than-lovers-exploring-ash-and-eijis-love/

I think readers tend to gravitate towards lovers because there’s this nasty, prevalent idea that romantic relationships are somehow more & deeper & better & closer than friendship (which I hate & I will fight people over.) To be clear: If you like the idea of Ash & Eiji being a couple, that’s valid.

It makes sense.

If you like to go with the easy route of saying Ash clearly likes Eiji, therefore he’s gay, I salute you for your acceptance of obvious things.

(This is so cute. I love animal motifs!)

I personally can’t view it that simply, due to both Ash’s extremely traumatic past & the world he grows up in.

However, if you take that (saying Ash is gay) & dismiss or look down on those who like to think as Ash & Eiji as soul mates or friends,

I will fight you.

And if you take Ash & Eiji as friends & dismiss those who like them being a couple, I will also fight you.

Because this is a story about fictional characters, people have multiple different experiences which color their perspective of it, so in a very real sense no one is wrong . . . Unless they have no concrete proof from the text to back them up. Or author.

I mean, you could argue Ash is secretly a ware-lynx, & that’s why he’s so strong & clever, but why would you? There’s no evidence in the story. Anyway.

Before I begin: An Important Note.

I was attempting to look up Ash’s step-mother’s name (& couldn’t find it, I’ll have to check my manga) & I found 2 fascinating reddit threads, who’s subjects I will add to later:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BananaFish/comments/9efv87/while_watching_banana_fish_with_my_father_he/

(2nd 1 contains minor spoilers, if you don’t know who Blanca is, don’t read)

https://www.reddit.com/r/BananaFish/comments/a2s0cj/yoshida_interview_on_why_she_decided_not_to_have/

The important part about the 2nd article is that the author states something which I agree with, which is

“Editor: "Certainly, Ash isn't active when it comes to sex."

Yoshida: "I think that's because Ash's character is sick of sex. He's been hurt over and over by sex... he's sick of it and he doesn't feel the need to have it. He's devoted his life to it, and he's had enough of it.”

Which appears to validate my idea that Ash is willfully asexual. He could easily be aromantic and / or have romantic or sexual desire for Eiji, sure (or other people. 1 person in the above link supposes Ash might be bi, which isn’t something I considered, but is certainly possible.)

Regardless, it’s clear that, whatever relationship or desire Ash might have for someone, Ash certainly dislikes / wouldn’t have sex with them.

I personally see them as friends/soul mates. To be specific, Ash firmly keeps himself asexual (key word, keeps) to such a degree it’s impossible to know if he’d actually be asexual or not if he’d had a normal life. It is simply impossible to know, and it’s tragic. Note, I’m not saying Ash is asexual, but that he actively tries to be. Yes, he flirts & acts sexy & kisses people. Except these are all acts a person can do & yet not feel any real desire or want to do them. I realize that sounds confusing, but it’s true. Some femme fatales do this all the time.

And as Otaku, She Wrote said, Ash is a combination of Femme Fatale & Rambo.

The manga also makes it clear, more than once, that Ash uses such moves as weapons or tools to get people to either drop their guard or convey a message as part of a plan.

He can do this & yet not feel any actual sexual desire. Also, I do want to stress, the idea that trauma will make a person asexual is wrong. Wrong. Yes, trauma can make people hesitant to start or continue a sexual relationship, or any close relationship at all, with other people. But. It won’t change if they feel sexual desire for someone else or not. So is Ash asexual? Who knows. I’ll explore this & my reasons more a little later.

First, I want to point out Eiji is probably asexual, given that he’s almost 20 & never had a romantic relationship (that I know of, up to vol. 10 of the manga.) However, he could be the type to slowly develop feelings for someone overtime. Eiji strikes me as rather shy & lonely - he hasn’t talked about anyone specific in Japan except his sister, so far as I’ve read. Or they could both be “once in a lifetime” types, which could be true for both being best friends / soul mates or a couple. As I said, from what I’ve read so far, it’s all vague enough you could argue in a lot of different ways about their relationship. (I love it.)

Now, my logic for why Ash is asexual. Ach, this section is grim & terrible & sad.

First, due to his past, it’s highly unlikely Ash can view any gay man in a positive light (or any man at all, really, his relationship with Max & Ibe is SO important & in many ways, a complete miracle).

(Ash teasing Max never gets old.)

Considering it’s also the 1980’s, there’s also a definite air of “gay men are bad” which Ash would pick up on (and has, I think.)(Even if he were gay.) Note, Dino Golzine is clearly a pedophile. Whether he considers himself gay is up for debate (so far as I know.) And unless he considers himself gay, or it’s otherwise stated, he’s not gay, but a pedophile.

To explain: I have yet to know of any evidence that he sleeps with any men in a consensual relationship (which would mean he’s gay.) Only young men & boys, all considerably younger than him, and for various reasons, clearly not with him by choice.

* IN FACT, I have yet to know of Dino Golzine sleeping with ANYONE consensually (Have I mentioned I hate this man? Because I do.) Brrr. I told you this is all painful. Here is an adorable kitten.

Anyway, also related to Ash’s trauma, it’s unlikely Ash can easily accept any sexual or romantic relationships as good or enjoyable. He clearly views close contact as dangerous.

As I said, the manga makes it clear on more than 1 occasion that Ash clearly uses his sex appeal & romantic gestures, such as kissing, as tools in his arsenal of weapons, divorced from his emotions, wants, or desires (mostly.) This isn’t to say he couldn’t be aromantic.

I mean, Ash did have a crush on a girl when he was 14. That’s got to count for something, surely, given the environment he was living in.

*I mention this because someone reminded this of me in that 2nd reddit link I put above, & they immeaditly dismissed it!

Um, hello? Crushes are sexual desire 101.

Of course, regardless of if he’s asexual or not, he could still care about his friends as deeply as he does. Remember, asexuality is about sexual desire, not emotions in general. You can love someone & not have sexual desire for them. People do this all the time with family & friends.

All of Ash’s tender scenes with Eiji? (that I’ve seen up to Vol. 10) I’ve had a bunch of similar heart to hearts with close friends over the years, & I’m super protective about my friends. But I still don’t have sexual desire for any of them. They’re my friends.

Friendship is so hard to define, isn’t it?

(I looked up friendship gifs & found this. Precious.)

On a related note, I have no doubt Ash has had a bunch of self loathing & hatred over his good looks (can you really blame him? Because a lot of people like to blame his good looks as the reason why they attack him. Which is so gross I have no words.) (Victim Blaming 101) And clearly Ash would take any tender or protective emotions he might have for another boy (or anyone) as something twisted, wrong, & dangerous.

(Again, given his past, can you really blame him?) Because I can’t think of any gay men, or anyone really, who’s been a good role model & decent human being, who is a grown man, except maybe the cops, but there’s a whole level of complexity there with Ash being a gang leader & linked to Dino Golzine that I don’t feel like getting into

(unless you want me to in another post!)

And yet Ash does care, deeply. I’m so glad he has friends in his various gang members & Shorter. They’re so important. He even has great moments with Max

(which is such a miracle, I’m going to cry if I think about it too hard. After being raised by a man like Dino & their twisted relationship, it’s astonishing Ash can trust any grown-up man, ever.)

Anyway, moving to a slightly different topic, consider that Banana Fish is clearly a world of men, and boys. Women and girls are few & far between (the main ones are great, but still few.)

(I can’t wait until we get to the part of Ash is disguised as a nurse, because I still don’t know what that’s about & I love it already.)

Anyway. Moving on.

Theory: Ash doesn’t view women as sexual cos that’s not the world he grew up in.

(Pictured Above: Not a lady)

Correction: Ash does mock the obi-gyn’s secretary with some pretty crude language. (which I will not forget & he needs to apologize for & never do again.)

Clearly he’s picked up on the disgusting idea of women as being 2nd class to men & also their value tied to their sexuality.

(Gee, I wonder who knows how that feels.)

However, far as we know, Ash has never slept with a woman (or girl.) Ash has never been sexually assaulted by a woman or girl.

Well, apart from those nurses. but that’s a long ways away in my reviews.

I will not forget!

Also, considering all his sexual encounters have been with men, and I must stress, grown-up men (again, so far as we know), it makes sense to me that Ash wouldn’t have any interest in women the way most men do.

I’m not saying he wouldn’t find them attractive or react to a nude photo - of course he would (unless he’s actually gay or asexual & has no sexual desire for women, or anyone at all.) However, even if he’s straight, I still don’t think he’d automatically think of women as being sexual / desire them in the way most men /boys would. Most women exist in a world apart from his. The most Ash does is talk to the secretary. He barely interacts with Jessica (that I remember, just wait til we get to that part) or his step-mom. I don’t think he even interacts with Shorter’s sister.

Yes, Dino Golzine asks if Ash has a girlfriend, but it’s done in almost jest, and Ash’s reaction makes it clear he has no interest in one. Again, because he has no personal experience of women as sexual beings (that we know of) it’s doubtful he’d easily think of them as such, despite his words to the secretary. He only knows men have sex with women because men talk about it, & there’s pictures & magazines. Again, this is difficult because there’s so few women in Banana Fish it’s hard to tell. So this is just a theory.

To sum, personally I think Ash might be asexual. Most likely, aromantic.

But again, given the complexity of Ash’s life, it’s really hard to tell. Yes, he kisses a boy at some point. But it was a cold blooded kiss, meant to pass along a secret message. It was part of a plan.

Ash never mentions this kiss again (far as I know, up to vol. 10 of the manga) and he freaks out ( is afraid & embarrassed) at a joke about wanting to view his public hair.

Again, is that due to his past of being abused, or is he simply asexual? Who knows. (The author knows, I’m sure.)

#random #banana fish #discussion #asexuality #think about it #fictional character #manga #ash lynx #eiji

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staravya · 4 years

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okay. having caught up on the latest critical role episode, I have some Thoughts about one of its more... concerning parts.

fair warning—this is long and convoluted, and I hope in my stumbling around I do not incite anger. I am trying my best to avoid doing so.

leaving aside how incredible Jester was and how heartbreaking Beau was and how brave Fjord was and how determined Yasha was—Nott. Nott, who’s desperate to go back to herself. Nott, who has a husband (who... she seems, honestly, less than torn about leaving) and a son (who she is much more reluctant to abandon). Nott, who dug her heels in and hesitated when the possibility finally arose. Nott, who believed the vagueness of a war waged in return for her might save her.

(readmore because this ended up being so much longer than i meant)

now. here’s the thing. due to the way I consume media, I can’t say I’m constantly aware of every inch of meh that every character does. in taking canon, I mold it a little subconsciously. all about framing and perspective, right? everyone can shine a flashlight on the same thing but not everyone’s bulbs are the same, and the colors might come through differently for different people.

I will say this: I’m annoyed at Nott. I’ve been annoyed at Nott for quite some time now, but in a faintly tickled way. more amused than, well, not. the week between episodes gives me time to digest and dismiss most of my grievances, honestly, so the fact that I’m typing this up immediately after watching it does mean that this is the strongest I will ever feel about this topic. eventually it will dissipate back into patient amusement.

but for now, Thoughts.

I don’t like that for her own sake she would burn the lives of two countries, but I understand it. I understand that she did not want her immediate friends to suffer for her. I understand that maybe she did not think about—or let herself think about—the fact that the Mighty Nein is not isolated, either. Kiri lives in a town that makes war weapons, which has already been attacked. they have friends within both countries who are well within splash damage. the ripple effects of war are bound to be incredibly devastating.

perhaps Nott is frightened again. she’s probably had time to think about her reluctance to engage the ritual in the first place. has she wondered if that reluctance was part of the lingering hex? is this exchange a way to corner herself into committing to the transformation? she can’t very well rekindle the war and then decide, eh, I’ll put the transformation that I got out of this for later.

I wonder if this comes from selfishness, her preserving and her group’s joy in exchange for countries torn asunder. I wonder if this comes from faith, her knowing that they’ve accidentally sown peace before, so what’s to stop them from doing it again? again, not thinking or letting herself think of the permanence of the bargain. her form was taken and she can never have it back until the hag allows her. if you offer up this temporary peace, will peace never be had? (until otherwise proven, I choose not to believe this never crossed her mind as a possibility, because to make that decision, my friends, is... so short-sighted I fear I will lose all sympathy.)

maybe she thought that if the new misery were dispersed widely enough across so many people it would hardly be felt—but no, that doesn’t make sense. that’s now how war works. that besides, it’s interesting that she implied to the hag that there would be many people’s miseries to feed her, and then tells her friends that they’d only dose up King Dwendal. somehow, I don’t think the misery of one king who may or may not be that attached to the peace (thankful for the lack of pressure and a chance to evade the Dynasty’s furious eye, perhaps, but not really all that dependent on the peace) is... sufficient.

a king watching his people wage battle on his (and his advisors’) command is something, yes, but I do not think he is the kind of king to generate quite so much misery from just that. wouldn’t it be easier and tastier to bind the soldiers themselves to the hag? more emotionally taxing, of course, but if Nott really wanted to go that route... hm. I don’t know.

it’s funny, come to think of it. ‘ends justify the means’ is a flawed pursuit, wearing purposeful blinders in the chase of a black-and-white answer in a world of grays, but in this case the ends still fail to justify.

in a way, the perspective that Nott is so dedicated to protecting her friends that she’d so quickly offer war is endearing, but for me, it’s more exasperating. her friends’ miseries are pinpoint. I’d expect ripple effects, of course, but none so wide and ruinous as to betray the peace that her Caleb had so desperately wished for.

I mean. it’s war. they’ve already tried to run from it before, but they came running back, and now they have roots in those countries.

I guess it just boils down to rationalization. there are so many ways to rationalize what Nott said, so many angles and interpretations, but for me all I can think of is all the people without the Mighty Nein’s power who will have to do endure the consequences.

cowardly is a word that comes to mind. but all the same, and maybe because I desperately do not want to hate a character, I think I get it. Nott’s world is shaking from the bones, and she is taking aim at any hint of stability—

huh. rationalization again.

interesting that Caleb didn’t say anything when he begged the Bright Queen for even a chance at this peace.

could be that this was... not a genuine offer, true. could be that Nott knew she wouldn’t have to follow through. (but would she have anyway? I hope not.) it could be Sam showing us the true depths of the poisonous misery pervading Nott’s life, a literary gesture rather than a narrative one, if that makes sense.

well. no matter which way my mind tries to bend and twist and fit the situation, it’s war, and I am inclined towards the choice that spares pain from those who cannot help themselves the way the Mighty Nein can.

in the end, Jester was the only one who made a decision in any vague direction of ‘right’ to me. from what I know, I can only praise her for refusing to feed the hag’s hunger for other’s despair.

now, here is what I know. I know Nott is flawed, as all good characters are. I know Sam is a shit-stirrer who enjoys wreaking havoc, and that we all delight in the damage that ensues. I know there will be fire and fury for a while, but I also know that time will wear it all down. I know this is a story—one treasured by many, yes—and in the end it is not our hands that play those puppets.

take a step back. breathe. take a critical perspective to the tale as you will, but do so mindfully; illuminate but not burn your perspective into the people around you. it’s okay to exhale and let go every now and then. misery is exhausting, and for us, there isn’t even a hag to benefit from it.

#this is like 1k words of utter garbage rip #i couldve been writing FIC #i couldve been doing HOMEWORK #but nope #decided i wanted to type up a little something #and now it's too much to delete and pretend doesnt exist #hhhhhh #critical role spoilers #critrole spoilers #starli speaks

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mysidewriting · 7 years

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Through the Storm

Note: I just want to say thanks to everyone for reading this story, this is the first time in like ten years that I've posted any of my writing online and I canNOT believe how many people are enjoying it! c: Also, I would like to warn you guys that from here on out, there will be a lot of possibly rapid and unexpected perspective changes (it's still the same two characters perspectives). That, and some violence. Things have officially gotten serious after so many chapters of partially just messing around haha Enjoy!

From the Start -- > Previous Chapter

Chapter Twelve

Hau's sporadic movements forced my heavy eyes open, he was bouncing in the plane seat next to me. My eyes rolled, gaze drifting out the window to see the slowly approaching island start to become clearer through the clouds. I'd attempted to make up for the lack of sleep by catching a few hours on the plane ride, but the seats were horribly stiff and uncomfortable and the plane rocked with gusty winds rather frequently. All I'd gotten out of my attempts at rest was a pounding headache resting right between my eyes.

"Lillie will be there already, right?" Hau said, his brown eyes wide and excited as he turned to me. The abundant energy rolling off him made me nauseous.

"She should be." I said through a long, exhausted sigh. I dropped my elbows to my knees and pinched at the bridge of my nose - hoping to dispel some of the pain before the air pressure started popping ear drums.

"I can't wait to see her! It's been so long!" He cheered, clapping his hands together. I cringed, I wasn't really looking forward to seeing how the two of them greeted each other. I was in a sour mood after being held on a string by Moon the previous night and seriously didn't feel like seeing any sort of 'blossoming relationship' bullshit.

She'd told me she was okay. I was grateful of course, especially considering the fact that she apparently shouldn't have been on the phone.... and I was the only one she'd talked to which certainly pleased my selfish wants... but she'd been so quick and vague. It almost seemed like she was acting like nothing had even happened, that nothing was wrong.

The plane stuttered and suddenly we were on the ground once again, nearly every person in the plane standing and murmuring various things as we pulled into the stall. Hau tugged on my sleeve until I finally stood, yanking my arm away from his anxious hands and stuffing my own hands in my pockets. The man who had been sitting at the end of our row tossed both Hau and I our luggage, I nodded a thanks and tossed the bag over my shoulder.

Hau stood there confused for a moment before turning to me and grinning again, rushing towards the exit. I followed after him with a heavy sigh. Hopefully this is over quick, then we can get on to the important part of this trip.

Lillie was standing near a strange statue in the center of the airport. She looked lost and confused and busied herself by messing around on her phone. It'd been two years since I'd seen her and I honestly couldn't believe how much older she looked... especially with the pokeballs hanging as keychains from her bag. She looked up fast as Hau shouted her name and charged towards her.

Her face lit up and the two embraced, I looked away as I closed the distance between us. Ignoring the playful chatter and laughs they shared in greeting.

"Gladion!" Lillie exclaimed. "You look sick!"

What. "Thanks, Lill." I said, voice oozing a dark sarcasm. Hau's laughter further aggravating me. "Nice to see you too."

She tut-tutted and suddenly she was poking at my face. I ducked and slapped her hand away. "You're eyes have more luggage than you do! When is the last time you slept?" She cooed, sounding so parental...

"Don't worry about it." I snapped, returning the glare she shot at me in response. Her eyes rolled and a frustrated sigh left her mouth before she decided a hug was a more appropriate way of saying hello.

I lazily draped one arm around her shoulders and hugged her back, muttering a halfhearted 'missed you' before she pulled away.

"I missed you too, Bub." She said through a gleeful smile.

Hau exploded then, "I missed you, Lillie! I wish you never left!" My eyes rolled and I attempted to coax the two of them towards the exit of the building. They fell back into their little conversations as they followed after me, how can so many words come out of these two?

"Should we go find a hotel to stay in?" Lillie asked as I shoved the large glass doors of the airport open. Despite the fact that Hoenn was just another giant island - it was far less humid here than it was in Alola. A good ten degrees cooler too.

"I want to check out that factory first." I said, "Let's head towards Lilycove and we can split up. You two find someplace to stay nearby and I'll go take a look around." The scenery of this town, Slateport, seemed almost like a more modernized version of some towns in Alola. More concrete, but just about the same amount of ocean space in the view.

"No separating." Lillie said, I glanced over my shoulder to her. "We should all stick together, especially when it comes to that place."

I grimaced, "I'm just going to look around the outside, Lillie. We can go in later on when you two are ready."

She shook her head, "Everyone together."

"Let's start towards Lilycove!" Hau cheered, breaking the conversation at a rather smart point. I was ready to fight Lillie on her stance of always being together, but it'd be a horrible start to this trip. We could deal with the issue later, when we were actually in Lilycove. Hau grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards the only route leading deeper into the island. I followed suit, pulling up a map of the region on my phone to make sure we didn't end up going in any wrong directions.

It would take a while to hike all the way over there, lots of towns and long expansive routes laid between Slateport and Lilycove. The thought was exciting in a weird way, seeing a new region by foot... wandering the wilds with a small team of Pokémon. It was nostalgic... I should try to get out and do this more, I'm sure it would count for something with environmental research if I thought a bit deeper into it.

We were just reaching the first fork in the route roads when Hau span to face me, his mouth opened but a different voice met my ears.

"Alakazam! Hypnosis, now!" The voice shouted from behind.

I span around quick, fast enough to see the wobbly pink waves of psychic energy flying towards us.

"Don't let them fall!" I shouted, rushing forward and grabbing both Gladion's arms before he could hit the ground. I barely got a grip on him and struggled to stop his quick plummet downwards. Brendan's alakazam managed to catch Hau and Lillie before they could fall, using some other psychic move to telekinetically hold them upright. I stared at their faces, shrouded in the pink mist of energy - it looked like they were sleeping pleasantly, not as though they'd just been attacked.

"Sorry." Brendan said with an awkward laugh, "I didn't want them to see us."

A frown creased my mouth and I slowly let Gladion down, unable to hold his weight up any longer. "I would have preferred not doing this at all." I said, making sure my knocked out friend didn't fall out of the position I'd set him in.

"Better us to do it than any of those crazy grunts." Brendan replied, commanding alakazam to set Lillie and Hau down as well.

"But couldn't there had been another option?" I asked, finally turning to look at Brendan. He readjusted the scarves covering his hair and mouth and recalled his Pokémon.

"Not unless you want to be found out and completely jeopardize everything." He said with a dismissive shrug. "The 'boss' is expecting us to be back with these three soon. He'll get suspicious if we take too long."

I passed another glance down at my friends, conked out and about to be put through some form of hell... my eyes started to cloud with tears, I blinked the moisture away before it could fall and giveaway my stress. "Okay." I muttered. I'll do my best to keep them safe. I can handle this.

"Come on, let's get them in the truck before anyone notices." Brendan said, stepping over to Hau and picking him up under the arms. I winced.

"Please be careful." I said as he dragged Hau towards the borrowed car and lifted him into the back seat.

"I won't hurt your friends, Rhea." He enunciated the stolen name to me, likely in an attempt to remind me that I couldn't give myself away. Right, and he's Aaron, not Brendan. I sucked in a quick breath of air and grabbed Lillie, Brendan doubling back to get Gladion as well.

We strapped them into the back seats and Brendan shoved another scarf at me, telling me to cover as much of my face as possible, just in case. I nodded and quickly tied the thing around the back of my head so it covered everything below my nose. I'd have to get some glasses as well if I planned on being around these three at all. I would never put it past Lillie to notice it was me just by my eyes. I hopped into the passenger seat of the truck as Brendan took the driver seat. I could just barely see Gladion's face in the rear view mirror and my heart started to ache.

This isn't how I wanted to see you again...

"Wake them up!" Archie shouted, pointing a large finger towards the new hostages. I squeezed my eyes shut as another grunt kicked each of my friends until they woke up. I wanted to shout when I saw Gladion's eyes start to flutter closed again but I bit my lip, wincing as he got another kick to the shin to keep him awake.

Hau was the first to speak up, both Lillie and Gladion were still taking in their surroundings and the state of their current being... tightly tied up to chairs and stuck in the center of a large group of people... all dressed the same. This feels so eerily similar to team skull it makes my skin crawl. It really was no different, the motives of this 'team' were just far worse than anything those goons had tried to start. "Who are you?! What is this place?!" Hau shouted.

Archie chuckled, swinging a thumb back towards his bare chest. His biceps flexed as he did this and Brendan's eyes rolled in reaction, drawing a short nearly silent laugh out of me. "I'm Archie, captain of Aqua and this is our fantastic seaside headquarters, prisoners!"

"The hell is Aqua." Gladion replied, filling in the silence that a now shocked Hau had created after hearing the word 'prisoners'. Gladion had such a perfect poker face, he didn't seem intimidated by the situation at all, his eyelids hanging half-mast and a disinterested look sat on his face.

Archie grimaced, the comment seemingly hurting his ego a bit. For some reason he thought Aqua was known across the region's, not that there was any basis for the thought. He was just full of himself.

"Aqua is the organization that's going to change the whole world!" Archie boomed.

"Why is he explaining this stuff?" Someone standing next to me whispered. "Shouldn't he just get to the point?"

I shrugged, "he has a very strict order to these things." At least I think... I wasn't sure, I wasn't yet 'in on' all the jokes drifting through the grunts. Brendan kept telling me I had to pick up on those things so I wasn't suspicious...

The grunt laughed, whispering "True." To my relief.

"Yeah? Really?" Gladion replied to Archie smugly. "How exactly do you plan to do that"

Archie's jaw locked, "That's none of your concern for now, kid." A devilish grin fell across his face. "Listen here, all of ya."

Lillie was silently freaking out, I'd just noticed it. Hau was trying to get her to calm down though he didn't seem to know how to do it when his arms were tied to his sides and making too much noise could possibly result in more kicks to the shins. I almost couldn't believe how cool and collected Gladion was... I wished I could get in his head and hear exactly what was going through his thoughts.

"I'm sure your all wondering why you're here and tied up, aren't ya?" Archie announced. "Ya see... I have a great friend who lets me access all the flight records to and from here and when I saw two kids from Alola heading this way I just knew they had something to do with that damn champion of yours."

Brendan went stiff beside me, clearly putting in a lot of effort to not look at me in reaction to Archie's words. I simply chewed harder on my lip, looking to my friends and unsurprised to see looks of shock across all their faces.

"So tell me, are you three here to help that brat?" Archie snapped.

I could see Gladion's jaw bone working, his gaze turning to a glare. A whisper snaked through the crowd of grunts, I heard my name repeatedly and I swore the room got colder. "What do you know about Moon!" Hau shouted, legs flailing like he was trying to get out of the bonds.

Archie let out a booming laugh, "All I know about that Moon girl is that she managed to escape from Magma and has suddenly gone missing."

"Magma?" Gladion asked, pushing for more information. He is the smart one here, the actual scientist, I guess.

Archie seemed a bit irritated by the push about Magma, but despite the angry look he flashed at Gladion he answered the question. "Magma is our rival team, they have the same end goal but are using a different way of reaching it." A grin fell across his face once again, "They've got everything wrong except for one thing - deciding to kill all the champions. That is something I'll commend them for."

I slapped a hand over my mouth before any noise could escape, Brendan actually looking down to me as well with that comment. I hadn't known the motives of the rival team... I hadn't known why the charizard were sent out or why I had been taken away and chained up in the Magma headquarters. I didn't expect them to actually want to kill me... or anyone else... All three of my friends were stricken by Archie's words. All wide eyed and slack jawed... it was Gladion's turn to fight against the restraints wound around him, leaning as far forward as he could as he yelled at Archie. "You actually intend to kill the champions?!" His breath hitched as the words came out.

"We need to find Gold." I whispered, my voice barely audible even to myself but I knew Brendan had heard it. His head bobbing just enough that it didn't seem like anything more than a twitch or shiver to someone who could have been watching.

"If we want to make any headway in changing this damn world, we have to get rid of those dubbed the peacemakers." Archie said, looking smug. I shuddered at his words. "Which brings me to my main point here. Do you have any information to share about that Moon girl?"

"Fuck no." Gladion snapped almost immediately. "Why the hell would we tell you anything if you plan to kill her?!"

"If you want to get out of here, you'll tell me everything you know." Archie said back with a heavy glare towards Gladion. "If you don't tell us anything, you'll all rot in my prison cells."

They won't say anything. To be fair they don't even know anything about my escape or my plans. Gladion was the only one I'd talked to recently, and even still I hadn't actually told him anything. He was trustworthy, and I knew he wouldn't throw me under the bus even if he did have information. I watched his face, unchanging as he locked glares with Archie. Lillie and Hau had turned to him as well, letting him do the talking.

"We're not saying anything." He stated calmly.

Archie's face fell, clearly irritated. "You're loss." He grumbled and waved his hand. "Send them off to their cells, we'll pry for more after they've understood the consequences."

Aqua planned on flooding the world over. Archie had this odd idea in his head that if the world were completely covered in water it would become a better place. He didn't seem to realize that it would involve killing every human and about 90% of all Pokémon as well. Magma had a similar plan, though instead of drowning all life... Maxie, the captain of the opposing team, wanted to burn it all. At least that was what it had sounded like he wanted when he'd strapped me down and yelled his plans at me. Much like Archie had just done with my friends. Their plan revolved more around eliminating the seas to provide more land, as though they didn't realize how necessary water was for all life.

Both Magma and Aqua were insane. I would never understand their mindless motives for destruction, but in the end it wouldn't matter. I was going to end it before things could get any worse. End it before they could even fully execute the major steps of their plans.

When Brendan infiltrated Magma's headquarters he managed to find where they were keeping the red orb. The key item of destruction that had the power to wake up an ancient god of creation. Sadly, he hadn't been able to steal it and get me out in one go. We would have to go back for that and also try to find Gold... if he was stuck there in that volcano based headquarters. I wasn't sure if he was...

Aqua had the blue orb, the opposite of the red orb though it did the same thing - with a different god of creation. Brendan and I were relatively sure that Archie kept it on his person at all times....

Brendan grabbed my arms and yanked me from my post near the entrance of the headquarters. Breaking my anxious thoughts of my friends, of Gladion, of the fact that they were here and I couldn't say anything to them. "I got you the night duty for the prison." Brendan said.

"What? How?" He hushed me as the other guard turned to look at us with confusion.

"Don't worry about the how, I did it. You can keep your friends safe at night." He grinned.

A long sigh of relief left my mouth, I'd heard some drifting rumors that the guy who had received the task of watching the prison cells was an asshole. Brutish and rude and likely to torture the captives in the middle of the night... something that Archie apparently didn't care about. I'd planned on sneaking in to check on my friends whenever I could. Just check the cells... see if they were okay... it wasn't much and I wouldn't be able to do much unless I wanted to screw up Brendan and my plans... but it was still something. No issues would arise if I had the position though. The only people in that cell area were my friends at this point so I'd keep them safe and hopefully more comfortable than other guards would.

"There is a small catch though." He said, looking nervous. "You'll be alone at night."

"What do you mean?" I tensed.

"I'll be on night shift too, they're going to send me to Magma at night to try to steal information and stuff." He shrugged in response to my shocked face. "It'll be like a two birds with one stone sort of thing for me though."

I laughed, "Whoa, a double double agent."

A grin fell across his face, one of the first things he'd told me about himself was how much he loved stuff like that. Secret agent sort of things. He thought it was so thrilling and oddly had a knack for it considering how easily he slipped in and out of two evil groups. I was worried for him, and kind of worried about being separated since I was nowhere near as good at that sort of stuff as he was... but if it would be night time, there wasn't all too much to be worried over.

"Just keep your phone on you, I'll get my phone if anything comes up." I requested.

"It'll be fine, Rhea. Maybe I'll find Gold even! And remember that May isn't far and just waiting for the call."

His friend May, the other girl currently training to defeat Hoenn's champion was in hiding in the town near Aqua's headquarters. She had a hotel room listed under some random guy’s name so if we needed a quick escape route we could hide out there for a while. She knew the whole plan and was just waiting for a word from us to do whatever we needed.

I nodded, retaking my position at the front doors as Brendan rushed back to whatever he was being forced to do. The other guard tried to ask what had happened but I ignored him, claiming it was nothing important.

Hau, Lillie, and Gladion had been thrown into three connected cells. Small windows rested between each cemented cage, allowing them to see in and talk to each other if they so choose too. Hau and Lillie were seated next to the window between them, whispering to each other as I walked in.

I felt like total trash when I saw them all in there. Though I hadn't asked them to come help, they had anyway. They had planned to do something for me and it resulted in something horrible happening to them. I took the blame, and let myself wallow in the guilt and anger at myself as I sat across the hall from where the three of them were contained. I just hoped they wouldn't be angry when they found out I was here, that I was basically helping to keep them captive.

I didn't have a choice. If Brendan and I let our disguises go and attempted to save the three of them, keep them away from Aqua and all the crazy shit, we wouldn't have such easy access to the orbs. Such easy access to ending the whole Aqua Magma issue in general. At the current time, the best choice was to keep them as safe as possible until we could get our hands on the orb. Once we had it, through whatever means necessary, we could get everyone out and move on.

What truly sucked about it was the fact that I had to wait until then to even speak properly with them as well. I would have loved to just rush up the cages and rip off all the stuff hiding my face. Explain myself, explain the situation, tell them exactly what to do and apologize to no end for putting them through this. I so badly wanted to run into each of those cages and hug them... it'd been so long since I'd seen Hau and Gladion specifically and I missed Lillie so much even after just a month of being apart. As badly as I wanted all of that, I couldn't do it. Brendan had pointed out that they could give things away accidentally if they knew it was me. As much as I trusted them, I didn't trust, at least, Hau and Lillie to put up a convincible enough act that I was still missing. Brendan didn't want to risk it at all, and I knew he was right to want that. A lot of horrid things could happen if anything was accidentally slipped.

But Gladion...I knew he could put up the act, he could hide all evidence of knowing my location and plans if he needed too. His stoic poker face earlier in the day had only proved that to me more. It was unfair to tell just him though, and I wasn't sure I could handle him knowing either. I was putting so much effort into suppressing my thoughts and feelings for him. Not that I didn't want to encourage them, I just knew I'd screw up along the way if I let myself think too much about him. Especially if he did know it was me sitting across from the cage and not some dumb 'cult' follower. I knew I'd try to sneak in to talk with him. I'd already done that on the phone the other night and it got me an angry telling-off from Brendan. I absolutely had to treat him the same as Hau and Lillie and it meant I had to hide my own thoughts from myself for now.

My gaze drifted off to where he sat, he hadn't said anything unlike Lillie and Hau who were still whispering to each other. He had his back against the wall opposing Lillie's cell, his arms across his chest, and his eyes shut. I couldn't believe how still he was, how calm he seemed to be. The other two were clearly unsettled, I could tell by the way Hau was tapping his feet and the way Lillie raked her hands through her hair quickly. I suppose he could just be containing all of it... But every other time I'd seen him stressed his hands had started to shake and his face would contort with whatever emotion was causing his stress.

His eyes flicked open and met my gaze, like he could tell I was watching him. Those emerald eyes made my stomach explode into butterfree, yet I continued to hold his gaze. Thankful for the dark glasses hiding my own eyes.

"Are you the guard?" I quickly turned my head to Hau, seeing him standing near the bars and looking towards me.

I nodded, heart pounding in my chest. Be careful of the way you act, be careful of the things you say - how you say it, your voice, your gestures. I let out a quiet breath, attempting to relax.

"What happened to Moon?" He asked, his face scrunching up with worry.

I flinched, hoping it wasn't visible to them. All three of them were watching me now and for some reason my mind drifted back to when I'd first went to Lillie's house in Kanto... when we were all sitting on the video call...

"No." Gladion's voice was eerily steady and emotionless. "Don't ask or talk about her at all."

"Why not?" Hau asked, "I'm just asking what happened."

"Don't say anything about her at all." His eyes shut once again.

Lillie looked between the two, looking a bit confused for a moment before she nodded. "He has a point, Hau. It's probably a good idea to just avoid talking about her so we don't give them any information."

"Okay how about this then?" Hau continued. "What are you guys planning on doing to us?"

Lillie's face grew concerned her hands fiddling with the tips of her hair. She had probably been stressing over the same thing, she'd been so scared when Archie had them all tied up. I wished I could actually answer the question...

"I don't know what they are planning on doing." I said, talking in a low, steady voice that sounded at least a bit unlike my normal speech.

Gladion must have noticed, though, I turned just in time to notice the confused look on his face before he seemed to drop the thought. "Why wouldn't you know?" He asked.

I shrugged, "That's information that we don't receive."

The three of them fell silent once again, all looking towards the ground with varying degrees of stress and worry on each of their faces. I pulled my legs up against my chest and hugged them, resting my chin on top of my knees.

"What should we do, Gladion?" Lillie asked, her voice much quieter. She didn't want me to listen, at least that was what I figured.

He didn't respond to her right away, simply continued to watch the dust float across the ground in front of him instead. I found myself wishing I could get into his head again, understand what he was thinking and feeling. I wished I could text him at the least but my phone was locked away by Brendan's demand. I need to stop thinking about that for now anyway.

"We'll wait it out for now, Lill. I'll figure something out, okay." He said finally. Looking oddly remorseful as he met her gaze.

Things fell very quiet after that. Lillie and Hau eventually retiring to their beds for the night.... resting on thin mattresses with nothing more than a sheet stretched across the lumpy surface. I decided to go grab blankets and pillows for them once all three had fallen asleep. I couldn't imagine the day guard would give a crap about that and no one else would notice either. I waited for the rhythmic sound of their breaths before stumbling to my feet and heading towards the hallway. Gladion's voice stopped me in my tracks and I span to face his cell.

"Where are you going?" He asked, his voice blunt and flat.

He'd been so quiet that I thought he'd fallen asleep while he was propped up against the wall. I guess it was a stupid assumption, he barely slept normally - why would he sleep more in a prison cell?

"I'm getting pillows and blankets for everyone, please stay quiet." I said, struggling to use that low sounding voice again. I picked up pace as I left the room, avoiding further confrontation with him.

Brendan was leaving as I came out of the dimly lit room that currently captivated my friends. He was flanked by two grunts and all three were dressed oddly, still in that typical blue stripped Aqua shirt but with horribly try hard casual clothes on as well. I held back a laugh as Brendan saw me and his eyes rolled.

"We're going to the volcano." Brendan said with a grin as he passed. That meant they were going to Magma tonight. Hopefully he can get stuff done there quickly.

If Aqua could steal the red orb like I figured they were planning, and Brendan found and released Gold we'd be so much closer to ending this delinquent danger. I could only hope that things would move fast.

Three blankets and pillows were a struggle to carry up the stairs and conspicuously bring into the room. I kicked the door open and dropped the pile of soft fabric on the ground, sucking in a long breath before distributing it off to my friend's. Gladion was still awake and peered at me guardedly before taking the blanket and pillow from my hands and tossing them onto the bed. Up close his eyes looked so exhausted, his face seemed oddly hollow and the bags under his eyes were horribly dark. I felt sick, he needed rest. At least I brought him a pillow and blanket then, I guess. "Where are our Pokémon?" He asked without looking at me.

I hesitated, "locked away with the rest of your stuff." He didn't react to the words much, only stood there in the center of the cell with his back to me. It was so weird seeing him in person again for some reason, maybe because I realized I really like him. Whatever it was, I couldn't help but just stare whenever I saw him.

"One more question." He said after a long moment of silence, long enough that I had stepped away from the bars and started to settle onto the ground again. He glanced over his shoulder to me and mirrored my movements as he noticed me, sitting on the ground near the front of the cell and propping his chin up on his fist.

A shiver went down my spine as I matched his gaze once again...nodding was all he needed in response. For a moment I worried he'd figured me out already, that he'd ask why I was hiding myself like this. I wasn't sure if I wanted to hear that or not. Could just keep it a secret from Brendan... No, stop.

"What exactly are Aqua's motives? What are they trying to do?" His words sent a strange array of relief and disappointment through my system, drawing my eyes away from his and to the ground.

I can actually answer this one... "Archie wants to..." Sound supportive....

How the hell do you sound supportive about flooding the world?!

My hesitance was evident and Gladion's eyebrows dropped low, tilting just enough for me to know he was confused. "Change the world, make it a better place"

"What do you mean?" He said flatly, dissatisfied with the answer. "How is he planning on doing that."

"Flooding it." I muttered, giving up on trying to sound like I wanted Archie's plans to come true.

Gladion scoffed, "Flooding it? The fuck does that even mean? Is he going to drown the world?" A short, priggish laugh left his mouth, "I can't think of any way for that to be even remotely probable."

"It is." I replied.

His head shook, completely unbelieving. "How the hell..." a laugh escaped him again, "You don't sound so excited about it." He sneered.

"I wouldn't say I want that to happen."

"Even his grunts are against it." His head shook again, still seemingly amused by the concept. "If you don't agree with his aspirations, why are you here?" His gaze turned to piercing once again.

I shrugged. I didn't have a lie for him, I couldn't imagine any of the people here having an answer to why they even believed and wanted what Archie did.

His face fell after a moment, "Well, I guess I can understand to some degree." A sigh left his mouth, eyes taking on a thousand yard stare towards the ground. "There isn't always a better option, eh?"

I shrunk myself into a ball, both fighting off the sudden chill that was rocking me to my core and reacting to that distant look on his face. Lillie stirred in her bed, mumbling inaudible words in her sleep as she rolled over. She's cold too. I grabbed the keys from my belt, considering going in her cell to throw the blanket on her before she woke up.

Gladion sighed once again and stood, "Thanks." He grumbled and plopped onto the crappy bed. His face shadowed over by the dim lighting of the room. Please sleep for once... you need it.

#gladion x moon #fanfic #lonashipping #mahinashipping #gladion fanfic #pokemon #romance #adventure #Hau x Lillie #through the storm #through the storm chapter twelve

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incoherentham · 7 years

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I have a deck of flashcards where I put all of the factoids or bits of advice I’ve changed my mind about. This is my summary of those cards.

Lifehack: use velcro strips to keep common items where you want them

velcro is so tacky, I am never actually going to recommend this to anyone.

Lifehack: If you don't want to forget whether you've done something, like turn off the stove or close the garage door, do something unusual while you're doing it.

giving yourself extra associations indeed helps you remember things, but this issue is better tackled by other means than memory tricks such as checklists or strengthening the habit.

Lifehack: Microwave leftovers evenly by spreading your food in a doughnut shape

I have yet to encounter evidence that this actually helps, and recall it being debunked somewhere. Judging from the cooking patterns of potatoes, I have a hunch that what really matters is the thickness of food, not its location on the plate. If placement ever helps at all I bet it's dependent on the make of the microwave.

State a goal so it's most achievable by stating it in terms of measurable behaviors

My rationality senses are tingling. This feels like technically correct advice, which when followed in practicality will lead to going through motions vaguely related to the goal or listing out the specific things I can flog myself for failing at. It can be a useful push but could be harmful for me or people sufficiently like me.

Vim (on mac): you can't copy a portion of a line to the clipboard.

:'<,'>w !pbcopy acts as if you selected with Visual Line by default, it's quite annoying. My partner Lauren found a workaround that lets you do partial-line selects. I haven't put it into my vimrc, but I am so very happy to know that there's a way.

When I say I want to "persuade" people, I mean "bend the likelihood that someone does a thing, in a way they perceive as their own will"

This was a strict improvement on my previous mental framing around persuasion, which was not the sort of persuasion one wants to employ on people one likes, so I didn't do much changing of minds. This new definition pushed me to pause and explore the interaction between how people perceive my behaviors/actions and what actually causes their own behaviors. It's an alright framework for assessing persuasion tricks or attempts, but it's not the right mindset to actually attempt persuasion in.

Persuasive levers acronym: CAGED: Comfort, Acceptance, Greed, Ego, Drama

Based loosely off 'How to win friends'. Never actually used them. They're too abstract to build a strategy quickly off of, and the acronym is creepy.

Formatting SRS knowledge:

"use simpler models; you can always build on them later on": This is so vague it's useless

"Flashcard answers should be as short as possible?": I think people using SRS for complex or diverse topics stand a real risk of making cards lexically short instead of conceptually basic. Terseness is a good practice proxy for simplicity, but in the long run it's not the same thing.

"You should eliminate interference as soon as you spot it": No. I think you should keep it in there until you actually resolve the question of which is the correct answer

When you have next action, set up a trigger for it

This led to massive proliferation of terrible and often contradictory next actions. There needs to be an evaluation step in there.

If planning time permits, loop on contingency planning

I never progress from tweaking my plans to actually implementing them when I loop on contingency planning, and usually work myself into paranoia/defeatism besides. This needs more specific instructions to avoid the failure mode.

Contingency planning should be rapid and intense.

I disagree that it should be rapid and intense; I think it should be smooth. If you work yourself in a hurry or panic you are doing yourself a great disservice. See above.

You can use the subject's blog or twitter to help track down the context of an interview quote.

I tried this a couple times and couldn't find anything useful. It's potentially more useful for people who read news daily instead of catching up on it months later.

Rule 240: if your flight is cancelled or delayed, the airline has to offer you any available seat on the next flight out on any carrier.

That rule is way out of date. Similarish promises called "conditions of carriage" vary by airline and generally only apply if it's absolutely the airline's fault.

Having a narrow vision of possibilities in a social scene makes acting on opportunities difficult.

I was trying to make enough sense of social anxiety to do something about it. Social anxiety creates stress, which creates tunnel vision and reactive reasoning, which makes me even worse at solving on-the-spot social problems. This idea was not concrete enough to help me recognize and make sense of what was happening in the moment. On the occasions I did remember, it left me nothing to do about my anxiety except feel more anxious because I was probably missing opportunities.

I just said something. I should expect I'll need to repeat myself

I speak quietly. Expecting to need to repeat myself grates at something in me, and I'd rather solve this problem by learning to speak more loudly.

When I feel flicker of uncertainty about social event, insist on my ground rules: Clear plan for how I'll get back, when, what the price range is and who's paying it. Because people breaking your boundaries hurts you more than any potential benefit.

True but not easily implementable. I don't know how to actually get words out in some timely way, and it's too easy for [redacted] and [redacted] to distract me from pressing the point.

Notice subverbal thought, snap fingers

Cool idea for training gestalt thinking, but I never remember it except right after the card comes up. I need to think of a more specific trigger, that would target especially useful times to work in nonverbal concepts.

If there's a choice with many options, write down the top level clusters. Assessment time is less valuable than time spent implementing and pivoting; better to map the option space and pick with random number generator.

I think randomization is a very useful tool to avoid systematic bias, and I think people underutilize it. However, intuition and precedent are also very useful heuristics. Making a good decision about when to leverage which technique requires some technical understanding. That judgment has to be trained, and can't be replaced with a simple habit recommendation.

When work is boring, have fun

I was trying to learn a motto as if it were a habit. Have Fun is not actually an action though.

When I'm confused in conversation, say "Wow, I did not understand that. In particular, X."

When I felt confused or overwhelmed, I would silently shut down and stop contributing or paying attention, which was a problem because some of the really interesting conversations in the Bay Area get very confusing. This habit was meant to give me an opening back into an information-dense conversation. I didn't get a chance to use it before I moved to Utah. My current biggest concern is shutting down in important office meetings, and its phrasing is too brazen to use there.

The most common psychological effect posited to explain the surge of suicides in May and June is the broken promise effect; people think things will get better in the spring, and then they don't

Apparently the May/June suicide phenomenon used to be larger and is now disappearing (acc. to data in switzerland). I got this card secondhand, its source is a NY times article, and it's an isolated factoid I don't have any other context to evaluate in.

To eat a cupcake with class, cut the bottom away from the muffin-top and place it on top of the frosting. You now have a classy cupcake sandwich.

I don't get how you're supposed to bite into the cupcake sandwich without squishing out all the frosting. This seems like only a marginal improvement, not worth memorizing.

If you can say "I think" in place of "I feel", say that instead

This is an attempt to gloss everyday language into a more NVC-friendly format. I thought this would be a strict improvement over claiming your thoughts as an emotional experience, so no one can defend ridiculous claims with "You can't say I'm wrong about my feelings!", but in practice you can still defend a lot of malicious accusations under a thin banner of "that's just my perspective!".

As I notice I'm missing knowledge, I should note to myself that my current mechanisms don't route through an important area

Too vague. The notes about "I don't understand this" just kind of pile up and make me feel stressed without providing a viable pathway to fix my blindspots.

When I'm trying to go to sleep, run through steps: Breathe. Replay my day. Mentally "turn off" body parts. Count backwards.

This is such a long instruction step I never get all the way through. Execution, especially on Replaying my day, is too varied for habit reinforcement to catch on.

When feeling suspicious/paranoid of people, make a small hand wave to draw attention to myself. Admit distrust aloud if possible and an option of how to respond to it. ("I distrust this, AND I will...")

Habitually stancing myself as if other people are out to get me really hinders my working ability and emotional wellbeing. I hoped this would break vicious isolation cycles and help me accumulate evidence for my System 1 that paranoia wasn't warranted. Unfortunately, examples of people responding well did not accumulate faster than my discomfort at forcing myself to do unsafe-feeling things.

When you're in "cold" emotional states, use your self-control to build systems that prevent poor decision-making

To the extent that I think I know how to build a "system that prevents poor decision-making", it constrains my actions too much and I have no room to build feedback cycles.

An example of using problem-solving instead of punishment with kids: "What can we work out so that you can use my tools when you need them, and so that I'll be sure they're there when I need them?"

I expect that this gets implemented a lot as "here, let me tell you an extremely constrained formulation of the problem for which the only logical solution is to do exactly what I want you to do".

Record 'bugs' on paper or in Stride app.

One of the tricks I've discovered when training a skill is to pick a concrete target I can hit on a ratio between 1:4 to 4:1, and just keep track of that ratio while ignoring the impulse to analyze what I'm doing to cause the result. (This has correlaries in neural networks with RPROP and RMSPROP.) This is supposed to operate on a similar principle of "this is just a data point". At some point it turned into a depressing commentary and lists of complaints.

One project a week

It sounds impressive to announce your intentions to do cool stuff on a regular basis. I wasn't very motivated to actually work on the stuff though.

Dan notices that his chain smoker dad has still lived to 90 without lung cancer, and infers that cigarettes aren't that bad for you. His reasoning flaw is misuse of the availability heuristic.

Misusing the availability heuristic, yes. I think the general strategy of copying your long-lived relatives' habits is actually pretty robust.

You can set up a system to self-regulate by making an action for a change that also suppresses the triggers for related actions from firing for a while

A textbook answer that will not in any way guide me to recognize or create such systems in real life.

My blog posts should first and foremost have a story arc. For any information source in a blog post, I should aim to include reproducible methods.

I fail at the stage of make myself write words, aiming for a particular writing style doesn't help much.

Tinkering vs. pure rationality techniques: overlearn the pure styles at the start, then make them your own.

Need to operationalize 'overlearn' more. I don't have good systems in place to keep up deliberate practice.

When soliciting feedback, spread my arms or make a pinching motion to denote the scope of corrective feedback I'm looking for. (Overarching changes for a prototype, or details to fix on a final draft?)

I'm not asking for in-person feedback readily enough to practice this habit. Until I am, this mostly turns into an anxious gesture to ask that people not criticize me about things I'm too fragile to think about right now.

Framework of Technical vs. Adaptive problems

Rationalists tend to favor a narrative where every problem has a technical solution, and ones you think don't are really just poorly framed or under-specified. I think this narrative encourages tilting at windmills. Adaptive-ish problems exists in the sense that there are some things that you are going just keep getting wrong, and maybe never even see from inside whatever framework you are currently using to think about your problems, no matter how many meta levels you go up. I don't think technical/adaptive carves concept-space at its joints; it's obscuring something fundamental to distinguishing kinds-of-problems.

When I'm notice anxious, perfectionist behavior, open my arms wide and say "I trust you" to myself

So hokey. It was a very good stopgap measure, but not enough.

Stretch and intentionally take up space when I enter a personal area

This is me refusing to flinch from the world before it gives me a reason to. (It's what HJPEV would do.) It's another habit where I'm trying to reverse-invoke a brainstate by replicating the outcomes it would have caused. It's not a bad idea — Fake it till you make it is a thing, stepping outside of self-reinforcing cycles is a thing. But such interventions are not powerful enough to counteract whatever common causal factor keeps regenerating these issues.

If a debuggee is giving nothing to work with, say "Some things come to mind. Let me give you four ideas.. Is it <3 examples of what I suspect>.. or something else?"

The "or something else" is a very important part, and with the way my explanations meander I don't often get to it.

My prayer...

The world as my witness I call upon you to know and be known in return The void as my jury I call upon you The damning and beautiful silence My heartbeat as signal The knock knock that matters So long as you can feel at all Nothing must stop me but that which can stop me So mote it be

It's based on a core mindset concept I recently scrapped. I tweaked this prayer too often for it to act as good anchor anyways; better to start from scratch.

#Strategic Review

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